Highly Branded
Designing for an industry where trust is scarce and choice is vast.
Most people chuckle (and high-five me) when I tell them I attended a marijuana conference for work. But the Marijuana Business Conference & Expo in Chicago was no boondoggle.
There were lanyards! There was conference schwag! There were uninspired buffet lunches. In their pinstripe suits and Birkin bags, the crowd was decidedly more Goldman Sachs than grungy stoner. Sure, there were after-parties and a booze cruise on Lake Michigan (pot yacht anyone?), but these people meant business.
And it’s not hard to understand why. With proven market demand, increasing supply, and more states legalizing recreational use— not to mention federal legalization expected within a few years — savvy entrepreneurs are positioning themselves to take advantage of an imminent and highly lucrative domestic market.
The question is, how will they compete? Aren’t they all essentially selling the same thing?
Yes and no. Yes you can walk into any dispensary and get the same strain (in wine-speak this is like a varietal) of cannabis that you can roll into a joint. But one of the more interesting things happening in the industry is the convergence on what are known as “concentrates.” This is the product of an extraction process whereby cannabis plants are the raw material, and THC oil is the refined product. This oil can then be infused in baked goods, beverages, topical lotions, or used in vape pens.
While cannabis entrepreneurs will certainly be able to differentiate themselves from a product perspective, let’s go back to you walking into that dispensary in the first place. You’ve made a choice to go there. Maybe someone told you about it. Maybe you liked the name. Maybe it looked clean, polished, and friendly.
Once you’re inside the dispensary, you make more choices. You look at the products, you read labels where you can, you ask the budtender about them.
The way the dispensary looks, the service experience, the way the products communicate through their names and labels, their ingredients and flavors, are all fundamentally expressions of their brands, whether intentional or not.
In this next evolution of the cannabis industry, entrepreneurs will compete for consumer dollars by building brands.
There are several well considered brands emerging in the cannabis industry today — brands like Kiva, Marley Natural, flowKana, and the dispensary Silverpeak. However the bar is generally pretty low, which is great news for entrepreneurs who care about design.
For those budding entrepreneurs among you, here’s a crash course on articulating your brand. This should be useful whether you do it on your own or with the help of an agency (trust me, there are professionals for a reason).
Lesson 1: Define the “brandscape.”
When developing a brand there are three fundamental things you should understand to set yourself up for success:
1. What matters to people. This is how you create a brand with relevance. Go out into the world, talk to people you think might be interested in your offering (and people who aren’t, but could provide interesting reasons why not), and understand their unmet needs, desires, and aspirations. How does your offering address these things? How does it need to change? What new ideas do these conversations spark?
2. What your company can uniquely offer. This is how you build brand truth and authenticity. If you have a higher purpose and passion, a strong company culture, or unique capabilities — whether a technology or team of experts — celebrate it. Just don’t try to be something you’re not. Consumers will call bullshit.
3. The context, which is another way of describing where people come into contact with the brand (on shelf? in an app?) and what the competition is like. This is how you build a brand that gets noticed. Figure out when, where, why, and how the brand could be relevant to your target consumer by mapping out his or her habits and behaviors. When and where are these people in the right mindset to engage with the brand? This is why Noosa, an Australian yogurt company, shows up at events like the San Francisco Marathon. They make a protein-packed snack relevant to athletes, and as my colleague Alexis Vogel described it, “it was the best thing I had tasted after 13.1 miles.” She then sought it out in the grocery store.
Lesson 2: Personify the brand.
Sometimes it’s useful to think about your brand as if it were a person. This can help you articulate its personality traits as well as pin down the other brands, people, and places that are part of its world. If your brand were a person, what clothes would it wear? What car would it drive? What celebrities would it idolize?
Make mood boards, jot down specific adjectives, and start to put some stakes in the ground about what the brand is and what it’s not. For example, if you take the Kiva brand, it’s more about the craftsmanship and quality of Four Barrel Coffee rather than the customization of Starbucks; more about adventure and nature like Patagonia over the athletic performance of Nike; and more indie foodie like Kinfolk Magazine versus glossy food porn like Bon Appétit.
Finally, study analogous categories like coffee, wine, spirits, and chocolate to better understand how their brands set themselves apart in what often feels like a crowded space with incremental product differences and minimal brand loyalty. Which are the brands that succeed in those categories and why? Is there a brand in an analogous category that would you like to model yours after?
Lesson 3: Write it down.
Once you’ve started to wrap your arms around the brand’s personality and characteristics, it’s time to write a brief. A brief will help you (and the people you hire help you) focus and guide how the brand will take shape in the world. Put together a simple document that answers questions like:
- For whom are we designing? Millennial moms? Boomers managing pain?
- What need or desire are we fulfilling for that person? What are we doing for him or her?
- How do we want people to respond to the brand? What do we want them to think/say/feel/do?
- Where will people interact with the brand? In a dispensary? What kind of dispensary?
- In one sentence, what are we all about? What’s our brand essence or “North Star statement”?
This last question is the hardest one of all. It should be a concise, inspiring, and actionable statement that influences every decision you make — from packaging, to product, to digital experiences, to uniforms, service interactions, and beyond. It’s a promise or mantra that addresses a real human need, and it should be felt in every consumer touchpoint. It should also ring true to the company’s employees and guide the work they do every day. Here are a few good ones from companies you know:
Jet Blue Bring humanity back to air travel
Airbnb Help people feel like they belong anywhere
Uber Everyone’s private driver
Another way to do this is leveraging Marty Neumeier’s “onliness statement.”
Here’s Harley Davidson’s “onliness statement”:
Harley Davidson is the only motorcycle manufacturer [what] that makes big, loud motorcycles [how] for macho guys (and “macho wannabees”) [who] mostly in the United States [where] who want to join a gang of cowboys [why] in an era of decreasing personal freedom [when].
Brand essence or onliness statement in hand, you can then give it more dimension by writing a short story or manifesto in the tone of voice of the brand. The story should be an introduction to the brand that conveys its reason for being, its beliefs, and its promises. Anyone — whether a designer creating your logo or an agency creating your campaign — should be able to read the story and clearly get what the brand is all about. Remember that busy humans will be reading it, so keep it short at no more than a couple hundred words.
Give these exercises a go, try things out, throw things out, and refine each time. The process of defining your brand is tough and often expensive, but rest assured that the investment is important — essential even — to achieving sustained relevance, authenticity, and differentiation in the market. It will give you clarity of purpose and a rubric for making decisions as you grow.
Most importantly, in an industry where trust is scarce and choice is vast, a cohesive and compelling brand will give you an unfair advantage. At least for now.
