Assessing Success

With decades of experience in the cannabis, retail and consumer packaged goods space, Angela Pih’s expertise is to help accelerate brands to the next level.

Pih served as the chief marketing officer for California-based cannabis companies Papa & Barkley and CannaCraft. Most recently, she was named the vice president of marketing for Harborside, a California-based vertically integrated cannabis company. In this Q&A, Pih provides her top insights into how businesses can examine the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.

Andriana Riscutto: What are your top tips for evaluating the success of a marketing campaign?

Angela Pih: From a brand side, you need to hit on a number of goals. Are you building [a] relationship with your dispensary? Are you of value to the dispensary who’s going to be stocking your products and your brands? Are you educating their budtenders who influence the purchase? Are you creating loyalty for your end consumer? Whether it’s with a flower, pre-roll, vape or wellness product, does the consumer feel that they are getting something out of that purchase? Do they feel an affinity for your brand so that there’s a preference for it? If you’re doing a programmatic type of buy, have you driven traffic to that store? Are you moving cases? This is a basic level of marketing activity that supports sales and brand building.

AR: How can executives successfully incorporate marketing trends?

AP: A little over a year and a half ago, we were really noticing that women [were] driving the sales of beverages across every demographic. Regardless of age group, women were outpacing men with infused beverages. While I was at CannaCraft, we actually created a brand called Gem + Jane that specifically targeted women and was formulated to satisfy a female palate. We also built an all-women team for that initiative. So, [it was about] seeing the market opportunity based on data and then going into product innovation and product development for a brand and line of products that met her needs.

Then, when you look at the tactics, you think, “OK, I know who I’m speaking to. I know that we need to activate key trends with tastemaker retailers. What do I have within our arsenal to make this a successful launch?”

AR: What legal aspects should marketers consider while working on a campaign?

AP: Regulation-wise, [it’s] just the importance of being compliant and transparent. So, if you’re speaking to your COAs [certificates of analysis], the origin, how clean your product is, and providing that level of transparency from seed to shelf are important points. When you’re building credibility for such a nascent industry, you want to be as transparent as possible because you are building trust. [Consumers] want to know that when they go back to your dispensary and pick up [their] second or third box of x, y, z, it’s going be consistent and give them the same effect as they had the first time. ... That’s what is going to build that level of consumer confidence.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited style, length and clarity. Read a longer version of the conversation online: bit.ly/cbt-last-word-pih

Andriana Ruscitto is associate editor for Cannabis Business Times.