Create a winning plan to market and brand your cannabis business

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branding, Create a winning plan to market and brand your cannabis business

(This is an abridged version of a story that appears in the March issue of Marijuana Business Magazine.)

Branding is a key component to any winning business strategy.

Of course, it also might be one of the most difficult strategies to get right – and if implemented the wrong way, branding can prove to be a costly mistake that could be the death of the product.

Branding is especially important in the still-developing cannabis space, where companies need to set themselves apart from a sea of competitors producing a relatively small number of marijuana product types: Think buds, infused goods, vapes and concentrates.

“You really have to work to find what … distinguishes your company from the next,” Taylor West, who co-founded Heart + Mind Media in Colorado, told Marijuana Business Magazine.

“This is not a market where there are a dominant couple of companies who are spending large amounts of money on marketing and getting a strong foothold. It’s lots and lots and lots of small to midcap-type companies.”

So, what to do?

“Ultimately, those folks are all competing on things like price. And one of the only ways to break out of that cycle … is to develop a brand that people latch on to,” added Taylor, formerly deputy director of the National Cannabis Industry Association. “That really is the value of a brand. And it’s hard to put a dollar value on it, because it is to a certain extent intangible.”

The marketing hurdles that marijuana companies face are well-documented – federal prohibition, local advertising limitations and social media restrictions, to name a few – but entrepreneurs in the industry have plenty of resources to create and implement a desirable brand.

Marijuana Business Magazine spoke with West and other cannabis marketing experts to produce a comprehensive package on marketing MJ companies and products.

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