Winning in cannabis with emotion-based branding

Branding 101 says your product must be meaningfully and measurably different than its competitors to capture market leadership.  How do you achieve this in cannabis, with its sea of me-too products?

In my opinion, the only sustainable and defensible brand position for non-edible products is through satisfying a consumer’s emotional needs.  Every individual has many emotional needs including social status, personal control and a sense of security.  Any brand regardless of category can create brands that deliver on these psychological needs.

The CPG industry has paved the way with emotional branding.  Take Coca Cola with its ~ US $255B market cap.

Saying Coke is a successful brand is an understatement. The firm consistently wins in hyper competitive product categories.  Moreover, Coke is part of the zeitgeist of every country it is marketed in.  It is also not lost on most consumers that the product is merely sugared water that looks like its competitors - and also promotes tooth decay and obesity.

Coca Cola’s ability to elevate their brand well beyond a functional value proposition (e.g., taste) has been the key to its long-term success.

I never worked at Coca Cola (I am merely a humble ex P&G brand manager) but my read is that they identified early on and consistently appeal to three key emotional values (brand tag lines):

Happiness (“Real Magic”)

Authenticity (“The Real Thing”).

Permanence (“Always Coca-Cola”)

These values are repeatedly transmitted in an integrated (written, spoken and visual) omnichannel fashion through advertising, packaging, messaging and promotion.

The work doesn’t stop there.  To make sure they are hitting the emotional bullseye, Coke’s marketing team regularly undertakes consumer surveys to determine how their beverages score on more than a dozen value attributes, which have included “young,” “modern,” “warm,” and “friendly.” Tracking polls are part of a feedback loop. When the scores of a particular value wane, advertisements etc. are created to reinforce them.

There is no reason why cannabis brand could not adopt the same approach (with allowances for regulatory restrictions). The challenge, in my opinion, is whether the firms have the marketing talent and patience to see this brand strategy to fruition.  It is not always an easy or quick journey.

To leverage emotion-based branding, marketers first need to identify a target market and conduct extensive (I’m talking quantitative, qualitative and anthropological) research on their consumer and retailer need states i.e, the conscious or sub-conscious problem to be solved.  The product or experience is then designed with a feature set to deliver on these needs states.  Only then would marketing and promotional efforts follow.

#branding #emotionalbranding #marketing #cocacola #coke #bestpractices