How Has Experience of Marketing Your Cannabis Business on 2023?
I think that our pitch has always been: know your customer. Know who your customer is know what your customer wants. So far that hasn’t seemed to have been important to the dispensaries. Do you remember in the early days when we were doing this, you’d walk into the dispensary and talk to the employees and you quickly found out that the owner came in once a week for about 20 minutes…made sure there was money to buy product for the next week and pay the employees for the next week…then he was gone. But nobody could make a decision beyond that. I believe that’s changing as the business matures a bit and new people are coming into it. Also, circumstances are forcing a more business-like atmosphere.
Is the Nightmare of Marketing in the Cannabis Business Going to Change in 2024?
That bad marketing of the past is going away. What we, Canna Creative through StrainGO, provide is knowledge through data that’s developed through each customer interaction. We provide a pathway for them to do something that they can’t do on their own, which is actually target market through hardcore marketing. We don’t do the marketing… though we can…we provide the information that is absolutely necessary to actually reach that next customer. I believe that need is quickly catching up with reality and that for the retail portion of the business to have any chance to rise above the midline, they’re going to need to develop and learn to decipher the data that is present. They need to acknowledge its importance in decision making and developing a loyal customer base. That’s my belief anyway. It simply is no different than any other business in that manner.
That’s why we re-engineered StrainGo specifically for the uniqueness and local aspects of the NM market. We are trying different ways to show ‘proof of concept’ here in New Mexico as here’s what we found out, they don’t really care what happened in Colorado. Not sure if that’s homer type attitude or a ‘we know what works best for NM’ type of thing. This caused us to face that reality and the need to build the service as a new local-centric business…making it a New Mexico software as a service business, I think that smart people, people that need to answer to someone else and have a need to justify their business plans and decisions, are going to start realizing the need… that need to stop leaving so much on the table perhaps in spite of healthy current cash flows…they will realize it’s no longer simply business as usual. My scenario is one smaller firm comes out of left field and sees remarkable success and people are going to say wonder how’d that happen? What did they do that is different They’ll start re-analyzing their own business stance. They have to as it’s the normal course of business maturation. I believe that’s coming quickly by the end of the year, I think.
To be sure I’m not saying unequivocally that everyone will suddenly realize the need for target marketing and the role of data generation in that. But I’m starting to see the industry wake up to its relevance. This is what we at StrainGO have been evangelizing about for the past 5 or 6 yrs. Hopefully, we will be in a position—-again—-to demonstrate how we can help a MJ business develop that retail base and strength with just a very little attention focused on it.