What is field locking in multi-location marketing?

Field locking is the control behind multi-location and franchise marketing. Headquarters owns the brand and the compliance line, while each location runs campaigns in its own market. Without a control, local edits drift away from the brand and the agreed review.

A field lock sets, for each field of a campaign, whether a location may change it. Headquarters typically locks brand assets, the key message, and compliance requirements, while leaving local details such as venue, dates, and contact information open for a location to edit. The split is a deliberate design choice, and getting it right is what makes the model work: lock too much and local teams feel hamstrung, lock too little and the brand drifts.

The lock has to be enforced, not advisory. If a locked field can still be changed through an API call, the control is meaningless. The durable approach rejects an edit to a locked field at the server.

In Cohiva Campaign, headquarters activates a parent campaign to selected locations, creating one child instance per location, and a field-lock configuration sets which fields a location must not change. A locked field edited at a location is rejected by the API with HTTP 403 FIELD_LOCKED. Headquarters sees the whole network, while a location sees only its own campaigns, and every go-live still clears the compliance gate.

Field locking is what lets a network grant local teams real freedom without giving up brand control. Rather than reviewing every local edit by hand, headquarters decides once which parts of a campaign are fixed and which are open, and the system enforces that decision everywhere. A location can adjust the venue, the dates, and the local call to action, but it cannot alter the approved creative, the key message, or the compliance requirements, so the brand stays consistent across markets while local teams still move quickly.

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