Has Branding Failed Cannabis?
It's the difference between knowing who you are as a brand versus knowing who you want to have as your customer.
After nearly 10 years in cannabis, it's hard not to acknowledge the industry, as a whole, has yet to truly leverage—at scale—the power of creative, intelligent and effective branding. Of course there are outliers; brands that emerged out of legacy marketplaces driven by passionate founders with an unrelenting focus on product quality, brand presentation and education. They built what they wanted for themselves, and this singular focus on product quality and original presentation, streamed outward organically
Is it simply that standing up a business and getting to market have trumped the need for quality, consistent and creative marketing?
Big Maybe.
In any startup environment tough choices about how and where to deploy precious capital and human energy abound. Add in a macro dose of regulatory and taxation challenges suppressing our industry and it's easy to see why so many brands and businesses stall out. Just when you've got one market figured out, another one pops up, the marketplace shifts, wholesale prices fluctuate wildly, capital dries up, consumer preferences change.
Exciting, Frustrating, Occasionally Heartbreaking? Yes, Yes and...Yes.
Small brands with promise have struggled to expand and scale. In some cases, founders have chosen to slow their roll, eschewing (seemingly) easy cash in new markets, so as not to take their eye of the ball in their home states. In others, the complexity of arranging the necessary partnerships in new state marketplaces, garnering the right human resources or high CapEx requirements have hobbled progress.
Large MSO’s —who have the power of the purse to invest in great branding often fall short—overestimating how their vertical integration would serve them—negating the need to design great brands and ensure optimal product quality. Sometimes this works for a while, but rarely lasts long. It’s one reason we believe MSO’s have failed to live up to their cherished pro forma expectations. Having worked with 4 MSO’s, the two things they have in common are:
Their desire and financial ability to build great brands
Their eventual tiring of the above.
It sucks.
So has branding failed cannabis? Or is it the other way around?
While obviously there is always room for improvement, the truth we’ve most run up against is that there is no playbook for the legalization rollout. Lots of people are trying lots of things. Most have failed, some are squeezing by and a very select few are raking it in.
And sure, we’ve been disappointed here and there, but we’re also hopeful that with each new state, with each new marketplace, with each new human who has access to legal cannabis, the branding part will catch up. It has to. You can get by with mediocrity for a while. (Though honestly, why would you want to?) But it simply never lasts. And by the time most brands recognize how they’ve fallen behind, it’s too late to recover.
It’s one thing when a new state legalizes and available brands are limited. But anyone either lucky or competent enough to get on the shelf and establish early market share knows that competition is coming, sooner rather than later.
We also want to do our best work and to eclipse our own creative boundaries again and again. The best brands are forever projects, if we do our job right, and you do your job right, your business should be growing necessitating constant work, new product development hence new packaging, new creative campaigns, new people, evolved growth cultures, new audiences that require updated and refreshed messaging.
We know the best is yet to come and that’s what we are here for.