When do cannabis brands need to rebrand?

Staying relevant requires constant work at the brand level. Sometimes it’s evolutionary. Sometimes revolutionary.

A brand journey is never straight or direct. As competitors come and go, consumer trends change, and categories evolve, a clear brand strategy is your compass that ensures your brand stays relevant and turns commercial goals into human connections. For cannabis specifically, new scientific discoveries can totally reframe the way consumers understand the effects of different products or strains. Changes in regulations might destroy the dimensions of a product category. Or the bar just might have risen and your brand is stuck looking like a cover of a 90’s rap album. Factors like these would hint to needing to rebrand.

When your brand strategy is based on the current consumer insights & state of the market, your product formula, packaging design, brand identity, advertising, and all marketing activities engage with your target audience. However, sometimes you find yourself at a point along the journey realizing that one of the above is out of sync with the market. Here are some of the signs that your cannabis brand might need a reset.

How do I know I need to rebrand?

You will likely be reading this because of a combination of gut feel and some market feedback that’s telling you your brand and marketing is under-indexing in connecting with customers. We’ve listed some starters below.

Is your target audience from a few years ago no longer the piece of the pie you want to own?

Do you have new products or capabilities that are limited by your current branding?

Have you acquired, merged, or partnered with another business?

Have new competitors entered the space or existing competitors changed up their brands?

Have regulations made you question the long-term viability of your brand or core proposition?

Is your brand not compatible with the regulatory environments of new markets?

Did a retailer drop you or move your packaging to a less than desirable part of the shelf?

Have your social feeds completely lost steam or are losing followers? Or the comments and customer feedback are giving you hints?

Maybe your brand idea was too limited and you’ve run out of stories or ideas to share? Or your portfolio has become too broad and diverse to hold simply under your original brand?

These types of questions and others will be drivers for the need to change. However, they won’t necessarily dictate the path you should take. A rebrand might be the correct action to take, or the challenge might be at a portfolio level in which new ranges or sub-brands would be a smarter solution. We’ll follow up on that topic another day. For now, let’s assume you do need to rebrand.

What does rebranding look like?

As you can imagine, based on the many reasons that might be driving a rebrand, rebranding is not a singular process in its own right and can play out many different ways. Even if it’s clear what is broken, the objective and challenge are in deciding what part of your brand needs reviving to bring it back to fighting strength.

Among the most popular rebranding types are (from evolutionary steps to revolutionary):

• Facelift: barely noticeable updates that ensure your brand design evolves with its environment and doesn’t look outdated are a must for digital-first companies like Google, trend-driven makeup brands like Covergirl and youth culture icons like 7UP or MTV.

• Modernization: generally modernization is used when the brand is overall on point but needs an aesthetic refresh in order to appeal to the evolving consumer & category newcomers. Budweiser, Diet Coke, Starbuck’s, Wendy’s, JCPenney, Chobani, Hershey to name a few — the majority of rebrands fall into this space. It’s a necessary exercise that brands undertake every business cycle or two, depending on the pace of the category.

• Rebranding: noticeable change of brand identity that reflects a company’s updated positioning (PizzaHut shifting to a more wholesome food space), direction (Dunkin Donuts dropping Donuts to own the coffee experience rather than just donuts) or target audience (Burberry targeting younger demographic). Depending on how out of touch the brand is with its target, rebranding can be a gentle evolution or dramatic revolution. The different equities and assets are assigned to the chopping block or to be subtly altered or saved entirely.

• New Brand Creation: there are two main reasons for a brand to need to create an entirely new brand. First is a major change to the company’s structure like a split when Kraft rebranded its snack food business as Mondelez to drive efficiencies, or like the merger of Guinness and Grand Metropolitan to create Diageo. Second, is when operations are the only thing worth holding onto and the rest of the business, including the product or service itself, needs to be changed, like in case of Weight Watchers that rebranded as WW as it shifted toward overall health as opposed to just weight loss.

How do I know what level of change is required?

Identifying what is required of your rebrand starts the same. Diagnosing your situation will be the result of consumer, competitive, regulatory, technological and retail analysis. Unfortunately, there is no fast and cheap approach to figuring that out. Get it wrong again and you’ll find yourself in the same position as you are now.

How do I start?

It’s essential to build in learnings from the failures of your current brand. What is not working and why? Then you’ll need to carry out some analysis on the topics mentioned above: consumer, competitive, regulatory, technological and the retail context (or other route-to-market). By starting with learnings you might make a good dent on understanding the challenges and opportunities within these topics, or rule out some entirely. Spending the appropriate time with the results will take you towards a strong and healthy brand that’s ready to compete in the future.