You’ve worked hard crafting the perfect cannabis product and have gotten it into dispensaries, only to find it lost in a sea of other brands. While this is a frustrating reality, there is a lot you can do to help your cannabis brand stand out. Here are the top three tactics you can take to maximize your brand awareness.
1. Create your unique brand identity.
With dozens of brands in each dispensary, it is easy to get lost. Many cannabis companies make the mistake of assuming that because they have a killer product, it will sell itself. However, if the customer has no visual to help them remember your product, they are unlikely to purchase it again. Brand awareness and recognition are primarily fueled by visual cues and sub-conscience emotions and information related to that visual cue. Strong branding not only helps capture the attention of potential customers, but incites recognition and brand loyalty in those who have tried your product before. Therefore, the first step in increasing your brand awareness is to establish a strong brand identity. Things to consider when doing this include:
Color scheme: Did you know that color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent? According to a study performed by the University of Loyola, between 62% and 90% of a person’s first impression upon seeing a product is based on color alone. In a sea of green, many successful cannabis companies are looking to other colors of the rainbow to establish themselves. Colors tell the customer a lot about your brand and each evokes subliminal emotions that, if done correctly, relate directly back to your brand identity. Good examples of this include brands Kushy Punch and Lola Lola:
Good Design: It’s easy for cannabis brands to throw a marijuana leaf on their logo and call it done, but this is a missed opportunity to differentiate your brand. As the market becomes more and more saturated, using unique design in product branding could keep your product from blending into the foliage. Both Dixie and Wana have crafted their branding to not be forgotten:
2. Establish Your Brand in the Marketplace.
Now that your branding is primed and perfected, it needs to be seen! Outside of the dispensary it is still important to introduce yourself and remind consumers of your brand and products. Unfortunately, this can be quite challenging for cannabis companies as many media outlets adhere to federal laws instead of state, which often excludes cannabis promotions altogether. For example, Facebook and Google prohibit advertisers from promoting anything cannabis-related, including CBD products.
Luckily, there are still options for getting your brand out there, including industry publications and websites, industry trade shows and events, and, for the most part, social media pages. The more impressions you have on a customer, the more likely they are to recognize your brand when they go to buy.
3. Maximize Visibility at the Point of Sale.
One of your biggest opportunity to stand out to consumers is at the point of sale. You have a qualified audience looking to buy, and you have an excellent product that will fulfill their need. All you have to do is capture their attention to add your brand to the consideration set.
With a superabundance of brands in a confined retail space, product packaging alone is often not enough to make your product stand out in a dispensary. Unlike traditional retail experiences, customers cannot browse and pick up products as they please to read the information on the packaging. Therefore, branded, attention-grabbers are vital to provide customers with the visual cues they need to make a decision.
Additionally, visual cues at the point of sale are important for brand recognition and loyalty. Consumers who have already experienced your product have a relationship with your brand, and reminding them of that relationship brings them comfort and positive emotions as they are deciding what to buy. If you make the buying process easy for your customers, they will often thank you for it with their loyalty.
Options for brands in dispensaries include branded signs and product displays, which can be tricky since real estate and retail layout of each dispensary can differ quite a bit. Keeping your signs within certain dimensions and making displays that are convertible to different spaces help solve a lot of these issues.
Companies like Zeon that focus on creative solutions to point-of-purchase challenges have the upper hand here, and are helping cannabis companies stand out in crowded dispensaries. With more and more companies increasing their POS visibility, brands without a strong point-of-purchase presence risk being left behind as consumers opt for the easy-to-identify brands instead.
For more information on how cannabis brands are improving their brand awareness in dispensaries, click here.