Business
Opinion: How cannabis retailers can improve woefully inadequate consumer education
Math is inevitable in the world of business.
Statistics, data, demographic data – all are important tools in the arsenal of modern business, and they’re potent when used correctly.
This is just as true for cannabis as any other business, but surprisingly few entrepreneurs and executives that I meet are well-versed in statistics or calculus, regardless of their supposed focus on data.
As someone with essentially a fancy mathematics degree, I’m writing today to dish out a little lesson in basic math – the calculation of an average and how that impacts cannabis marketing.
Rapid growth
First, let’s look at the overall cannabis market today to establish a baseline fact I think anyone reading MJBizDaily already believes: The marijuana market is growing rapidly.
According to an August 2021 Gallup poll, 12% of adults in the United States say they currently smoke cannabis, up from 7% in 2013.
In my home state of Massachusetts, legal cannabis sales have already surpassed $1 billion annually and are projected by the 2022 MJBiz Factbook to grow to as much as $2.6 billion by 2025.
By some accounts, the global cannabis market is projected to grow from $28.3 billion in 2021 to a truly startling $197.74 billion by 2028.
As the U.S. and other countries legalize more fully, there will continue to be a rapid influx of new customers to retail stores and dispensaries.
As any budtender could probably tell you, a majority of consumers know next to nothing about cannabis when they show up at a store for the first time.
There are a select few traditional market participants who make the switch, and even they are often undereducated on topics beyond flower.
It is still surprising to most people that you can even put cannabis in a beverage, and it is difficult and confusing to try to explain to them how marijuana-infused drinks differ from the pot brownie they tried in their youth.
Thus, I postulate that the education level of new consumers when entering the market, on a scale of 0 to 10, is zero.
Which isn’t great when I would say the average consumer education level today is maybe a 2.
Much to learn
There is so much to learn about cannabis.
It took me nearly a decade to achieve the understanding of the cannabis products I have today – and I create cannabis products for a living.
From THC and CBD and all the other three-letter cannabinoids to the hundreds of terpenes that exist in a flower, to extracts – BHO, EHO, CO2, rosin, hash – to things such as nanoemulsions, metabolism of delta-9 THC into delta-11 THC, it takes a long time to learn it all.
Don’t even get me started on sativas.
We can’t educate people about cannabis nearly as fast as new consumers will come into the marketplace, and so because the rate of cannabis education is much, much slower than the rate of new consumers coming into dispensaries, the average education level of consumers will continue to decline to nearly zero.
This will be true for at least the next decade, if not longer.
Keep it brief
So what are we to do about this when trying to educate consumers about why your product will work best for their needs?
Remember that people learn more quickly with short, pithy messages they can remember.
If you’re a brand, focus on educating them on the message of your product. Brevity is your friend.
Memory tricks, mnemonics – anything it takes to get your message across quickly and clearly.
Consumers will almost never engage with products in the way that you do, and you need to continue to put yourself in their shoes: What is the most important takeaway?
How do we communicate that both textually and visually? How do we communicate that psychologically and subliminally?
Budtender training
Consumer education does remain important, and putting a premium on budtender training – the folks who know this stuff for a living – is the best way to quickly disseminate information to consumers and train real guides out there who actually help people.
This goes double for medical cannabis patients, as there are still many, many new patients who need MMJ to get through their daily lives.
Budtenders can be a powerful source for both sales and accurate information if brands and dispensaries provide them with accurate information and make it easy to engage with.
And if we’re being honest, we’ve done a terrible job as an industry of arming budtenders with the information they need – I’m almost never given accurate information by budtenders at stores I visit.
Ultimately, if your product relies on the well-educated consumer who has the time to learn everything possible to decide whether to select your product, you will lose market share to those who build that quality into their communication.
People simply won’t be able to keep up, and you’re kidding yourself if you believe most customers will be reading those terpene certificates of analyses and actually understand what they’re looking at and have a reference point for if 3% terpenes is high or low for rosin.
But if you meet cannabis consumers where they are, and dispense information quickly and accurately, you can build a following that will grow with the market instead of fall behind.
Adam Terry is the CEO and co-founder of Cantrip, a cannabis beverage company based in Framingham, Massachusetts. He can be reached at adam@cantripseltzer.com.
To be considered for publication as a guest columnist, please submit your request here.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/how-cannabis-store-owners-can-improve-woefully-inadequate-consumer-education/
New Mexico regulators fined a cannabis operator nearly $300,000 and revoked its license after the company allegedly created fake reports in the state’s traceability software.
The New Mexico Cannabis Control Division (CCD) accused marijuana manufacturer and retailer Golden Roots of 11 violations, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Golden Roots operates the The Cannabis Revolution Dispensary.
The majority of the violations are related to the Albuquerque company’s improper use of BioTrack, which has been New Mexico’s track-and-trace vendor since 2015.
The CCD alleges Golden Roots reported marijuana production only two months after it had received its vertically integrated license, according to Albuquerque Business First.
Because cannabis takes longer than two months to be cultivated, the CCD was suspicious of the report.
After inspecting the company’s premises, the CCD alleged Golden Roots reported cultivation, transportation and sales in BioTrack but wasn’t able to provide officers who inspected the site evidence that the operator was cultivating cannabis.
In April, the CCD revoked Golden Roots’ license and issued a $10,000 fine, according to the news outlet.
The company requested a hearing, which the regulator scheduled for Sept. 1.
At the hearing, the CCD testified that the company’s dried-cannabis weights in BioTrack were suspicious because they didn’t seem to accurately reflect how much weight marijuana loses as it dries.
Company employees also poorly accounted for why they were making adjustments in the system of up to 24 pounds of cannabis, making comments such as “bad” or “mistake” in the software, Albuquerque Business First reported.
Golden Roots was fined $298,972.05 – the amount regulators allege the company made selling products that weren’t properly accounted for in BioTrack.
The CCD has been cracking down on cannabis operators accused of selling products procured from out-of-state or not grown legally:
- Regulators alleged in August that Albuquerque dispensary Sawmill Sweet Leaf sold out-of-state products and didn’t have a license for extraction.
- Paradise Exotics Distro lost its license in July after regulators alleged the company sold products made in California.
Golden Roots was the first alleged rulebreaker in New Mexico to be asked to pay a large fine.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/new-mexico-cannabis-operator-fined-loses-license-for-alleged-biotrack-fraud/
Four marijuana companies, including a multistate operator, have filed a lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in which they allege the federal MJ prohibition under the Controlled Substances Act is no longer constitutional.
According to the complaint, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, retailer Canna Provisions, Treevit delivery service CEO Gyasi Sellers, cultivator Wiseacre Farm and MSO Verano Holdings Corp. are all harmed by “the federal government’s unconstitutional ban on cultivating, manufacturing, distributing, or possessing intrastate marijuana.”
Verano is headquartered in Chicago but has operations in Massachusetts; the other three operators are based in Massachusetts.
The lawsuit seeks a ruling that the “Controlled Substances Act is unconstitutional as applied to the intrastate cultivation, manufacture, possession, and distribution of marijuana pursuant to state law.”
The companies want the case to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
They hired prominent law firm Boies Schiller Flexner to represent them.
The New York-based firm’s principal is David Boies, whose former clients include Microsoft, former presidential candidate Al Gore and Elizabeth Holmes’ disgraced startup Theranos.
Similar challenges to the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) have failed.
One such challenge led to a landmark Supreme Court decision in 2005.
In Gonzalez vs. Raich, the highest court in the United States ruled in a 6-3 decision that the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to outlaw marijuana federally, even though state laws allow the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
In the 18 years since that ruling, 23 states and the District of Columbia have legalized adult-use marijuana and the federal government has allowed a multibillion-dollar cannabis industry to thrive.
Since both Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice, currently headed by Garland, have declined to intervene in state-licensed marijuana markets, the key facts that led to the Supreme Court’s 2005 ruling “no longer apply,” Boies said in a statement Thursday.
“The Supreme Court has since made clear that the federal government lacks the authority to regulate purely intrastate commerce,” Boies said.
“Moreover, the facts on which those precedents are based are no longer true.”
Verano President Darren Weiss said in a statement the company is “prepared to bring this case all the way to the Supreme Court in order to align federal law with how Congress has acted for years.”
While the Biden administration’s push to reschedule marijuana would help solve marijuana operators’ federal tax woes, neither rescheduling nor modest Congressional reforms such as the SAFER Banking Act “solve the fundamental issue,” Weiss added.
“The application of the CSA to lawful state-run cannabis business is an unconstitutional overreach on state sovereignty that has led to decades of harm, failed businesses, lost jobs, and unsafe working conditions.”
Alabama regulators are targeting Dec. 1 to award the first batch of medical cannabis business licenses after the agency’s first two attempts were scrapped because of scoring errors and litigation.
The first licenses will be awarded to individual cultivators, delivery providers, processors, dispensaries and state testing labs, according to the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission (AMCC).
Then, on Dec. 12, the AMCC will award licenses for vertically integrated operations, a designation set primarily for multistate operators.
Licenses are expected to be handed out 28 days after they have been awarded, so MMJ production could begin in early January, according to the Alabama Daily News.
That means MMJ products could be available for patients around early March, an AMCC spokesperson told the media outlet.
Regulators initially awarded 21 business licenses in June, only to void them after applicants alleged inconsistencies with how the applications were scored.
Then, in August, the state awarded 24 different licenses – 19 went to June recipients – only to reverse themselves again and scratch those licenses after spurned applicants filed lawsuits.
A state judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by Chicago-based MSO Verano Holdings Corp., but another lawsuit is pending.
Source: https://mjbizdaily.com/alabama-plans-to-award-medical-cannabis-licenses-dec-1/
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