Adweek: Creating a Cannabis Brand Language

Cannabis poses perhaps the most interesting branding challenge of our time. It’s a product that’s been around forever, used by humans for thousands of years. Yet millions of dollars are being invested as though someone just discovered the next big thing.

The brands that tap the category’s potential will provide consumers with the best language to explore this new world for the first time.

In this Adweek article, FINE partner Josh Kelly describes how the most basic challenge in branding cannabis is how to create frames of reference without depending on old stigmas.

Long before its brief history as contraband, it was an agricultural product. Making sense of the countless configurations of terpenes, flavors, cannabinoids, ingestion methods, effects, benefits, and uses starts by making conscious decisions about where to play - just as someone once did in established consumer categories like coffee, health and wellness, food, or alcohol.

The challenges to cannabis branding revolve around stigma, misinformation, product inconsistency, and education. For all these things, a branding assignment starts with viewing the whole category again for the first time, so that your customers will, too.

Read all about it in Adweek. {subscription req'd}