What’s Your Story?

As a cannabis cultivator, your brand may or may not be visible on the shelves, but it is still important. Whether your product is distributed wholesale to retail providers for rebranding (white-labeled) or sold with your brand and label (black-labeled), your brand creates more than a visual connection to your product; it creates an experience for your consumer. In a growing industry, branding is fundamentally important. The better a brand experience is, the more likely you are to gain customer loyalty.

Your brand is more than your logo. It’s your story, the messages it sends and the visual identity that comes out when you tell that story. It’s your products, the logo on them and their quality. It’s the way customers feel when they experience any aspect of your company. Your brand is also your company culture and the services you offer in support of and in addition to your products. Simply put, your brand is what your consumers think and feel when they see your company name or logo, or interact with your products.

Tell Your Brand’s Story

The first step to understanding your brand is to craft the narrative about your business and how your product differs from your competition. Whether (and how) you fell in love with cannabis’s medicinal value or are implementing innovative techniques or rigorous testing standards, your story is essential.

From there, you can decide what you desire for your brand’s future. Do you aspire to cultivate 100-percent organic cannabis? To focus on high-CBD content? Specifically, you should tell the story via your brand’s website, but anything from the tone of your social media to the language on your packaging reveals pieces of your story. By identifying where you came from, where you are now and what your future will be, you are telling a story that will be your brand’s foundation.

After you’ve established your brand’s story, get specific by crafting complementary content on your website’s blog, social media or though stories in the press. This content should reflect your business objectives and speak clearly to your audience.

Through this kind of messaging, businesses have an opportunity to clearly call out brand differentiators. These differentiators will be woven into the messaging implemented at all levels of marketing.

Discover Your Brand’s Visual Identity

Once you have identified the story behind your brand, you can begin to develop the visual representations of that story with a logo and brand guidelines (including but not limited to: color palette, typefaces and brand symbols). Brand guidelines act as a set of directives for how your brand will interact with its consumers visually and verbally through packaging, advertising, social media, public relations and customer service. They ensure that your brand is consistent no matter how many products your company produces, especially if you operate across different vertical markets.

As a cultivator, your product is flower-based, and you need a logo that will stand out amongst the abundance of marijuana-leaf logos out there. This is where your brand’s objectives will play a large role. Are you a wholesale cultivator looking to distribute to medical dispensaries? If so, your logo and brand guidelines may take on a cleaner, medical-oriented look and feel. If you are a cultivator and dispensary owner, your approach will be different. Your cultivation’s branding will align with that of your dispensary, and will be focused on consumers.

To round out your brand’s identity, you must create a brand experience. This experience can be at the business-to-business level by providing unparalleled customer service and offering an abundance of information that reinforces your messaging and product differentiators. It could mean the ease of ordering, or consistently satisfied resale customers. At the business-to-consumer level, the brand experience is the combination of product quality, the brand story, the shopping experience, and the visual identity presented before, during and after the point-of-sale. Customers, both retailers and consumers, need to feel as though they are valued and informed, and through the branding process, you have been given the tools to do just that.