Building Your Cannabis Brand

Building Your Cannabis Brand

McDonalds, Starbucks and Disney are all brands that you immediately recognize and all of them invoke some kind of emotion.  You immediately recognize the logos and no what to expect when you go into one of their stores.  How do you create the same kind of branding for a cannabis dispensary?  Branding is the foundation of your business and doing it wrong can cost you.  In an industry that is as new as cannabis, build your cannabis brand is crucial if you want to survive the first 5 years.  Here is how you can build a brand that lasts well into the future.

Who is your customer?

If you want to build a brand that lasts it starts with your customers.  Who do you sell to?  Stop and think about this for a moment and bear in mind that you are not Walmart and “everyone” is not your customer.  Do you sell medical cannabis, if so then your customers are people who suffer from chronic pain or some other medical condition that marijuana helps with.  If you sell recreational marijuana then your ideal customer is someone else entirely.  Here are some questions that you need to answer before you start marketing.

You need to start building your brand by answering this questions.

How do you get in front of these customers?

Building a brand in the cannabis industry is more than just slapping your business name and a marijuana leaf over your merchandise and calling it a brand.  The visual elements of your brand such as your logo and website are where it starts.  You need a logo that defines you!  This is going to represent your business forever so you need something that represents you that you love.

Stay away from the clichés

If you want to build an authentic cannabis brand then stay away from the clichés that plague the industry.  Cannabis had to overcome a lot of stereotypes in order to have legalization come to pass.  Stay away from the marijuana leaf and things that scream marijuana, use different art and colors that are more authentic.  Work with a graphic designer to create the look you want.

The cannabis industry is new and if you want to survive the initial stages of growth then building your brand is crucial to that.  You want your dispensary to still be standing five years from now, the time to build your brand is now.