Thunderly lands Bojangles franchise marketing deal to boost growth

Bojangles picked Thunderly to run its franchise development and digital growth program, handing the Dallas-based agency one of its most visible wins yet. The assignment is broad and practical: paid media across search and social, creative development, SEO, website optimization, content creation, podcast production, and advanced analytics, all aimed at attracting franchise candidates who can actually build units, not just click around.

That matters because Bojangles is not a small concept looking for branding help. In 2025 brand communications, the chain said it had 266 company-operated restaurants and 561 franchised locations, and it reported $1.88 billion in systemwide gross sales for fiscal 2024. It also said it had more than 150 new units committed, with 154 planned locations across San Antonio, Ohio, New Jersey, and Dallas, plus additional growth lined up in New York, Nevada, New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Michigan, and Arizona.

Thunderly chief executive Scott White framed the deal as a performance problem, not a publicity one. “Our focus is on building a scalable, performance-driven marketing engine that not only increases brand visibility but also attracts the right franchise partners,” he said. That is the right lens for a brand like Bojangles, where franchise recruiting is really about filtering for operators with restaurant experience, business experience, and the capital and appetite to commit to at least three units. More than 93% of Bojangles franchise restaurants are owned by multi-unit franchisees, which makes lead quality the whole game.

The agency is also leaning on its AIM Model, short for Amplified Integrated Marketing, a framework Thunderly says was built for a search environment increasingly shaped by AI-generated answers and large language models. In practice, that means folding SEO, content, paid media, and public relations into one system designed to keep a brand visible even when discovery happens before a user ever reaches a website. For franchise marketing, that is a useful shift: one program has to work for local search, national awareness, and franchisee acquisition at the same time.

Thunderly’s own trajectory gives the deal extra weight. The firm has been in business since 1999, rebranded in March 2025 from BizCom Associates and Brand J, and debuted on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list in August 2025. For agencies trying to break into larger development accounts, the lesson is plain: vertical expertise wins when it is tied to repeatable systems. Bojangles did not buy a generic agency pitch. It bought a franchise-growth engine built for search, social, content, and multi-location lead generation, which is exactly where the market is headed.