2. Marketing Mary
The American Dream never really existed. It was a marketing scam.
One of the repetitive themes of this book is about creating differentiation. In the cannabis industry, you will need to not only learn about your consumer and your competition, but you’ll also have to be able to carve your way through a potential murky path of regulations in your market that may limit your ability to promote your business. This could be anything from a prohibition on sending out mailers to a hard no on having a pot leaf featured on your sign.
Logo
One of the things you do as a writer and as a filmmaker is grasp for resonant symbols and imagery without necessarily fully understanding it yourself.
The logo and branding of your cannabis company can be critical to your success. Several states have strong regulations regarding what labels can look like. One of the biggest concerns of regulators is that the packaging labels aren’t appealing to children and that the information they contain is complete and accurate, and in no way, misleading to the consumer.
Avoid having to pay for endless label revisions and avoid bright colors, pot leaves, cartoon characters, and even cute animals (oh no!).
It’s best to design your branding to appeal to adult consumers (at least technically speaking) who are your target market.
Like any other company producing a consumer good, your branding is how your customers will identify with your products or store. Some cannabis consumers are interested in sophisticated brands that match their high-end, professional tastes. Others refuse anything but the most fun, wild, and entertaining experience possible. Some people want everything really low-key and incognito.
Very few brands are going to appeal to all cannabis consumers, but there are some strategies you can apply to maximize your appeal.
Using flowery fonts, complex or amateur imagery, or naming your brand something esoteric can all lead to isolating large segments of the consumer market. Brands that can deliver a perception of quality, value, and fun are the ones that customers buy the most of. Logos with limited, bold colors featuring professional graphics and fonts that communicate clearly are obvious choices that many often choose not to make.
When helping brands design their logo and identify, Cannabis Industry Insider, Michael Schroeder, likes to literally walk down the aisles of any grocery store or drug store and look at the labels of the products on the shelf. He looks at what they carry the most of – that’s what they sell the most of, in any category.
It’s a good idea to try and model your branding on successful consumer products that have achieved ubiquity.
High Impact Marketing
A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.
If it hasn’t happened yet, your market will soon be flooded with farms, processors, and retailers. In the sea of options, how do you set yourself apart for consumers? This question is unique to your market, your area, and your brand.
The standard solution for medical cannabis dispensaries used to be to put up ads on services like Leafly and WeedMaps. This holds true in legal recreational cannabis as well. It’s a pay-to-play service model, whereas whoever pays them the highest price will be the most prominently displayed and therefore generate more customers. In most markets, this is a good, and necessary basic starting point, but what if your area is more secluded and your customer base isn’t relying on these apps?
One of the worst ideas Michael’s seen was when a store in his area decided to send out large postcard-sized mailers to everyone in the county letting them know their store had moved. The problem was that there were regulations prohibiting this, and public perception to contend with as. Being in a more conservative area that had begrudgingly allowed legal cannabis for the first time, it would have been best to think about the optics and tread more wisely.
From a public perception standpoint, Michael thought this was a poorly planned marketing idea, as children often fetch the mail for their families.
Moreover, this dispensary sent their mailers to EVERY address, breaking the rules regarding advertising within 1000 feet of schools, daycare centers, and more restricted sensitive use locations.
The store received multiple costly violations for this stunt.
This is a great example of why it’s critical to ensure your marketing strategy is coloring within the lines of your state, county, and municipality.
Another tactic that has been heavily employed in Washington and other markets is to sign flippers outside of stores. Over time this practice became more and more extreme in Washington, to the point where the sign spinners were dressed in full-body pot leaf costumes in locations across the state. While highly effective, and at the time legal, Michael thought it was another great example of where you might not want to push the boundaries in terms of public perception.
Always think about how your actions would be perceived from a prohibitionist’s point of view (yes, they still exist). What does it look like having a giant pot leaf dancing sign on the sidewalk in front of a line of cars? Does everyone want their children exposed to this?
Washington eventually outlawed sign spinners once they became an overbearing nuisance, but many stores kept them going right up to the effective date of the legislation.
Billboards
The power of visibility can never be underestimated.
Billboards are highly effective at drawing attention and catching eyeballs. There are, of course, regulations governing their use by cannabis businesses in various markets. While some states would consider cannabis billboards an attractive nuisance, others allow billboard advertising for cannabis businesses.
In this case, a critical factor in determining a compliant location for your billboard placement would be your distance from sensitive uses like a school or playground.
In addition to a permissible location, there are still your typical considerations to take into account for a billboard, like visibility, location, traffic, and demographics.
One way to find unique opportunities for high-value placements at an entry-level cost is to keep an eye out for locations that aren’t offering traditional billboard placements yet but have the infrastructure that could be repurposed for that end. Reach out to owners of large buildings with traffic-facing blank walls. An amenable land-owner who may never have considered a billboard just might say yes if you approach them and are willing to front the installation costs.
With these ads, most impressions will be made on someone driving by. You’ll want wording and a call to action that can be recognized and read in those 3 seconds that they’re looking at your billboard. What you’ve put into establishing distinctive, professional branding will come into play now. Give definitive directions to your store, if applicable, and a brief reason why your brand is the one for them. Imagery is best kept unique and eye-catching while remaining legal and morally sensible.
Social Media
A wise man does not chatter with one whose mind is sick.
Having a strong social media presence is a great way to set yourself apart. However, it can get really tricky, right away. Because the cannabis industry is technically still illegal under federal law, cannabis businesses are not supposed to be allowed to advertise on most major social media platforms, per their terms of service. That doesn’t mean you cannot, but you run the risk of having your social media account banned or even deleted. How effectively you can actualize your social media presence will determine if the risk is worth it. These days you can get away with a lot more on Twitter and YouTube, while Facebook is still a big risk.
Building a social media presence requires expertise and costs time and money. Like any other part of your business, you’ve got several options available to you, each with different benefits.
So if it’s risky and time-consuming, why would you want to spend the effort and money on social media anyway?
Because it works. Your customers may make their buying decisions based on what they encounter online. This could be through influencers, your social media posts, and seeing your logo supporting and sponsoring events.
Unless you already have a dedicated social media presence, or really want this to be a large portion of your company’s investment of time, doing it yourself is the least viable option.
If you are going the DIY route though, you’ll want to start with your friends, family, and local businesses. Friend them on social media, like their content, and make comments on their posts. Use the ‘Ask Friends to Like’ feature on Facebook and share Stories with daily updates of specials and events at your business. Make comments frequently on social media pages you like. This can have the effect of drawing more attention to your own page by other commentators. Find Facebook and other groups relevant to your region and specialty, then join them and share content consistently there, as well. These groups are a great way to find new farms to stock or stores to buy your product.
If you’re looking to keep this task in-house but not have to commit yourself to a new career as a social media influencer, the right staff member with a varied skill set can be assigned the task. You’ll preferably want someone who already has a social media presence or has demonstrated experience in establishing a brand presence.
This is an important job and has to be worked into your business plan. If you’re going to establish and maintain a social media presence effectively, this person will need to focus at least several hours per day on creating content, replying to comments, commenting on other accounts’ posts, reposting, and generally attending to this important advertising tool.
If you want to take the least chances and get the best results possible, you’ll want to find a dedicated advertising and media agency, preferably one with cannabis experience or focus.
The right agency can help you with everything from designing your branding, logo, and packaging to product photography, digital and print assets, social media and digital media marketing, and even event planning.
Great advertisements and pictures of products aside, to become and stay relevant, you’ll also want to share informational content, like links to industry news or medical findings. Grow your organic audience by re-sharing others’ content. Send your social media team to a featured vendor and have them share their experience.
Your goal here is to increase interaction with your social media pages and keep followers returning for more. These are some of the most valuable dollars you will spend in the current advertising environment.
Influencers
A celebrity is a person who works hard all of their life to become well known, and then wears dark glasses to avoid being recognized.
(In 2021, NBA legend and champion, Metta World Peace, joined the Cannaballers team as a co-owner, marketing executive and brand ambassador.)
(Last year the Cannaballers family tragically lost our partner, and all-time UFC great, Stephan Bonner.)
What is the power of ‘brand awareness’ and how can you supercharge your marketing and connect with your target audience with the help of an influencer? An influencer helps you stand out from the pack of me-too brands and create differentiation and credibility for the products and the brand that is being endorsed.
A great example of the ‘name-dropping’ power of having an influencer onboard, is when Michael went to interview Troy and I at our farm in Central Washington, for his social media channel.
He barely knew anything about our operation other than that we were licensees in Washington State for Tommy Chong’s cannabis brand, Chong’s Choice, and that alone was enough to pique Michael’s interest and drive content creation that he knew would connect with his audience.
Prior to making a deal to represent Tommy’s brand in the legal cannabis market, Troy and I were selling a brand that didn’t have much equity at the time and wasn’t well known to the local community. The advantage for us in teaming up with Tommy was that when the vast majority of cannabis consumers go into a dispensary, they’ve heard of Cheech & Chong, creating instant brand awareness and credibility for the products that we were making.
We subsequently doubled down on this theory when we leveraged my connection to Tommy to interview him and help create differentiation for this book!
Celebrity and influencer partners can also help drive online traffic and sales with social media posts and can additionally be an invaluable resource for networking opportunities with other influencers and investors.
After I exited from the Washington cannabis market and sold my interest in my California business, I teamed up with some of the other Cannabis Industry Insiders and NBA legend, Metta World Peace to start Cannaballers!
With Metta on board, I was able to attract an A-list team of professionals from a variety of different industries to come onboard and help me bring this opportunity to fruition while having a resource to meet investors, and influencers, and promote products on social media.
Loyalty and Word of Mouth
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.
The single most important thing you can do to establish your brand presence or your store’s reputation is to impress your customers, every time. Make them feel so great about the experience that they tell their friends and family about you. At very least set up a loyalty program that rewards 10% or 20% off a purchase after a certain number of visits or dollars spent. You can create your own program or utilize a 3rd party app. Loyalty programs are a powerful way to get customers actively invested in spending more money on your brand.
Atmosphere can impact customer perceptions hugely. For a store, you can get some local musicians to play live (at a moderate volume) outside your shop on holidays and special occasions. Extravagant décor during the holidays can also draw a large amount of attention.
Vendor Days
I love my fans, so when I get the chance to interact with them, it's beautiful.
Customers are hugely responsive to collaboration between the brands they love and the stores where they choose to shop at. Vendor days are a great forum for this. A cannabis brand (or multiple brands) spend the day visiting a store and interacting with customers. You can make these as simple or as extravagant as you want, but obviously the better the event is, the more memorable it’ll be, and the more reason for customers to keep coming back or buying your brand!
Simple vendor days might be a sales representative and a grow team lead standing with a small table displaying their logo and photos of their operation. It allows customers to learn more detail about their favorite brands and to establish a new meaningful relationship with the real faces behind them.
The best vendor days are like mini-festivals with interesting events, fun things to learn about, and great memories. This can really help you create a buzz around your brand.
Consider inviting a food truck, local musicians, influencers, interesting performance artists, and whatever ‘cannabis circus’ that you can afford to put on, that will pass legal muster. Vendor days should always be preceded and followed by a synergized social media sharing by the brand and retailers.
The value that you can derive from these events will depend in large part entirely on how well you and your retail or vendor partner can promote the event.
Giveaways
I'll do anything for free stuff.
Giveaways can seem like a no-brainer for a Vendor Day. Who doesn’t want free weed or cool swag? A word of warning here though is that some states like Washington, for example, have completely outlawed giveaways of all types for cannabis companies. This includes cannabis but also extends to any sort of merchandise that is not part of the packaging of the product.
At one point, unpeeled vinyl stickers inside of a bag (so the buyer can slap it somewhere later and show off the brand logo) were outlawed in WA, to avoid illegal giveaways. Even simple discounts can be difficult in Washington because businesses cannot sell cannabis for less than what they paid for it.
In California, giveaways of cannabis are likewise prohibited, but apparel, accessories, and paraphernalia all are allowed. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to get your store or brand everywhere that you can! Hats, t-shirts, vinyl slaps, anything that can be branded and given away freely will turn your customers into ‘walking billboards’.
Colorado and Maine allow discounts and even coupons, but giving cannabis away is illegal for licensed businesses. However, there’s no limitation on pricing, so cannabis can be sold for a (literal) pretty penny.
In Oregon, cannabis can be gifted or given away as long as there is no financial consideration. So long as it’s not a trade, it’s legal up to an ounce.
Meanwhile, Arizona medical cannabis regulations allow giveaways of all sorts including g merchandise, apparel, paraphernalia, and especially cannabis. Many dispensaries have ‘New Patient’ specials, where a first-time visitor receives free cannabis just for showing up.
Sometimes, these giveaways don’t even require a purchase. Every state is different so check on the latest rules in your market.
Branded Merchandise
If you're selling the same merchandise that's commonly available, and you've got no point of differentiation, you're dead.
A way for farms to create a branding opportunity that is compliant even in Washington’s draconian regulatory environment, is to sell custom cannabis strains. Having a branded, custom strain that is entirely exclusive to your dispensary or farm is a phenomenal way to build loyalty – and if it’s a good cut, you will reap well deserved recognition, too!
For states that don’t allow retailers to sell clones to the public, a good option is to work with a producer or farm to develop white-label products. They’ll grow, process, and package the product with your logo, allowing you to sell cannabis that matches the branding of your dispensary.
In Washington, only directly relevant paraphernalia and cannabis are allowed. In this environment especially, all lighters, branded vape pens, papers and every accessory your customers is allowed to buy from you, should carry your brand.
Expos
(K9-balling at the Vegas Convention Center in February, 2020, just days before the airports were shut down due to the global pandemic.)
(Gabriel Greenstein and the TetraLabs team dressed like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, 2011.)
(The first Cannaballers Roster at the MJBiz expo in Las Vegas in 2019.)
(Gabe Greenstein, and Cannaballers Co-Founder Ollie, showing love for our partner Xtsay Brands at Mohegan Sun in CT in March 2023.
When you're born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat.
There’s no doubt that industry- consumer facing, B2B (business to business), and networking events are a great way to get your name out there, giving you the opportunity to build brand equity and engage directly with consumers and vendors. How you choose to approach your presence and showing at an industry event is a question based on an assessment of your goals and budget. The caveat here is that whatever you do, as we will continue to repeat in this book to make it painstakingly and excruciatingly clear, you need to create DIFFERENTIATION in whatever ways you can.
Of course, the costs of going all out at an expo can add up quickly, so depending on your budget you can overwhelm the competition with superior firepower or you may need to get creative.
To illustrate the point, we’ll speak to two radically different examples from opposite ends of the spectrum, each employed by us to success.
When Bob and I were at TetraLabs, our company would go all out at expos and for many years we had the biggest, flashiest, and most extravagant booth at trade shows.
Our engineer partner had participated in planning many trade shows throughout his Silicon Valley career and additionally had been a hard core participant and organizer for Burning Man since its inception, helping to design and orchestrate complex settings and events for many years.
It was his goal to blow away the competition with more firepower and wanted to have the ‘biggest dick’ in the conference room.
The strategy worked well generating lots of attention, interest, and credibility behind TetraLabs plans to bring revolutionary new products to market that would set the modern template for extracted and infused cannabis product assortments in both the CBD and THC markets.
On the flipside, fast forward to 2019 and Bob and I were at a CBD expo in Las Vegas, trying to get attention for Cannaballers, and CBDisBetter, which was a new CBD producer of best-in-class CBD consumer and white label products that Bob had started with my help, even at the same time as Bob was helping me to start my new company, Cannaballers.
They were both on a tight start up budget, and I knew that he had a platform in Cannaballers that could help us stand out, draw attention and create a high impact presence at a fraction of the cost of what it would have been for us to have rented a booth and gone to the type of trouble that TetraLabs used to go to, to be bigger, better, and more noticeable than the competition.
Over the years as the competition has grown in sophistication, size, and resources, it is now much, much more expensive to win in this way.
Instead, I decided to employ the ‘walking billboard’ approach.
We had a team of four people who had come with us to the expo including Bob, and I. I had custom Cannaballers uniforms made for everyone. On the first day of the expo the team wore matching and striking, all white uniforms. The second day, we all wore matching black.
This strategy worked like a charm, and we stood out from the pack for very little cost. Everyone remembered us and recognized the Cannaballers brand. Moreover, many people at the expo were interested in talking to us to find out what Cannaballers was all about, and in the process, Bob was able to meet the potential white label customers, distributors, and sales brokers that he was looking to connect with at the show in order to grow his new business at the same time!
Community Outreach
(A flyer for the first public event hosted by the California Association of Producers of Safe Cannabis Edibles.)
The way to change the world is through individual responsibility and taking local action in your own community.
Another great way to engage with and add value to your consumers is by providing free workshops or participating in community outreach campaigns. This can be a great tool for building a local brand and giving back to the community. This will show the people in your area that you are not just in this business to exploit the drug profits, as many see it (not us of course).
Throughout Troy’s work with Tacoma Wellness in DC, he has been able to develop a curriculum to help their company reach out to, and address the needs of their local community. Whether you’re offering workshops, cleaning up a creek, starting a public pumpkin patch, or giving out free massages every other Monday, finding a way to engage with your local community should be a huge benefit to your business, your staff, yourself and well… your community. It’s not only a great business strategy, but it’s the right thing to do.
There are any number of different, and easier things in the world that you could do to make money. Why be in the cannabis industry if you don’t like your neighborhood and have no passion for the plant, or the greater social mission?
All businesses, especially in the cannabis industry should be about creating value and solving problems for their customers, even if that means that your solution is the right product that fits their needs.
Yeah, Yeah, I Get All the Civic Responsibility Crap, But Seriously… What IS in it, for Me?
(Photos from the CAPSCE Community Clean Up Event from 6/4/11 @ Guadalupe Creek, in San Jose, CA.)
Those who have everything given to them become lazy, selfish, and insensitive to the real values of life.
As a business owner, getting involved can pay huge dividends. When you engage your local market, you’re hitting on a number of big values for your brand, all at the same time, including but not limited to:
- Engage with a local audience of potential consumers to build brand loyalty
- Engage in market research to understand the needs, preferences, quirks, and tics of the customers in your area.
- Demonstrate authenticity and the value of your contribution to the community
- Gain exposure for your business and hopefully even get some earned media
Key Chapter Takeaways
The Do’s and Don’ts of the Dope Industry
- Do– Attend industry events and expos to make important connections and get the public reactions to your brand!
- Do– Be afraid to give away a bunch of free s**t, e.g.- promotional materials, in-store demos, and swag giveaways!
- Do– Stand out with influencer support!
- Don’t– Forget word of mouth is priceless.
- Don’t– Forget to be active in and give back to your community.
- Don’t– ignore my last point and neglect to participate in your community you anti-social, lazy, and/or stingy bastard!