The cannabis landscape is full of brightly colored packaging, sleek minimalist websites, and tons of loud characters that define what it means to be a cannabis brand. Creating a powerful cannabis brand that resonates with your target audience is no small feat, but it is an integral part of building a business. At SM Services, we understand the importance of cannabis brand discovery and the impact it has on shaping consumer experiences. Let’s talk about cannabis brand discovery and how it can help you build your brand.
Understanding Cannabis Branding:
Cannabis branding is all about cultivating something your target audience identifies with. In order to create a successful brand that resonates with people, you need to do research, or cannabis brand discovery. This discovery can take different forms – doing research, focus groups, or just talking to your customer base. At its core, cannabis brand discovery is about identifying what your target audience wants, and cannabis branding is how you deliver that to them.
How Cannabis Brand Discovery Helps Grow Your Business
Having consistent branding can help you increase profits. If you have a great product or service, you likely already have a base of people who would be more willing to try more of your offerings, but they need to be able to identify your products and connect them to your business. One aspect of cannabis brand discovery is identifying how existing customers think about your products. If you are still at the ideation phase and don’t have products, cannabis brand discovery can help you identify the best way of speaking to likely customers and portraying your products in a way that resonates with them.
Researching Cannabis Brands:
One way to jumpstart your own cannabis brand discovery is by looking back at how successful cannabis brands structured their own brand identity. Look at their social media pages, websites, products, packaging, and customer reviews. All of these elements combined will show you how people connect with other brands, and how they could connect with yours.
Key Considerations When Evaluating Cannabis Brands:
As you sift through the multitude of cannabis brands, several key considerations should guide your evaluation process. Pay attention to the words they use to describe themselves, the colors they use for their packaging, and how they interact with their customers. Things as simple as the use of “weed”, “marijuana”, or “cannabis” can tell you a lot about how a brand interacts with its customers and how it is trying to portray itself.
Building Your Cannabis Brand Using Cannabis Brand Discovery
After market research, it’s time to ideate and put all of your learnings into a cohesive cannabis brand. When working with clients, one of the first things we ask for is a brand guide. This is a document, usually in PDF form, with many pages including the kind of language that aligns with your brand, your brand’s logo, colors, and information about your most important product offerings. This may seem overwhelming at first, but if you were thorough in your cannabis brand discovery process, putting all of this information together is easy, and it will make future product launches and marketing efforts infinitely easier for yourself or your marketing team. Having a north star to point all marketing efforts and products to will make your brand feel more cohesive, which is incredibly important to consumers looking to join an ecosystem and stick with one brand.
As you navigate through your cannabis brand discovery journey, remember that creating a brand is not a short term process, it is a long term commitment for yourself and your customers. It creates a cohesive idea that guides future products and marketing efforts, and that also helps customers identify with you and your brand.
