Market expansion is more than just new states
Wellness products have made very few meaningful inroads. The majority of the wellness products are really adult use being masqueraded as wellness to sell canna products legally.
US companies fooling themselves into believing that they are expanding the market when they are just getting the same people higher for less money.
Given this product gap in the market, combined with CBD being offered with no regulations and rules, creates an opportunity to offer real solutions, backed by real medical research and science.
Easy to understand and harder to perfect and scale
The majority of cannabis companies operated by business executive’s vs legacy cannabis operators, do not own their SOP’s for any product and are always at risk when any of their extractors or cultivators leave.
This creates an opportunity to create and license canna, CBD, CBD/THC blended SOP’s to US operators.
If there are specific technologies that can be marketed along with these SOP’s (always better together), there is an opportunity to bundle the 2 together.
Smokables and Wellness are counter-intuitive
Reducing reliance on smokable products while not being reliant on Vape/Concentrates as the alternative will require dosing with immediate gratification.
Wellness buyers do not smoke as a way of healing and no doctor could ever feel good about pushing a smokable alternative.
This creates the opportunity for continued product development of different form factors, dosing and time-release products.
Why pursue models that are waning?
US market will not be dominated with analogs to big tobacco, pharma and spirits. It will look more like wine and microbrew beer industries.
This creates an opportunity for the creation of many different approaches to SOP’s/Equipment all differentiated by the bio-mass inputs and combinations.
Intimately this creates an industry with many profitable purveyors vs a few large MSO’s.
Cannabis oil tastes bad and doesn’t mix easily into other products
Integration of CBD/THC into drinks, alcohol, nutraceuticals, and consumer products has for the most part failed outside of gummies and chocolate.
The concept is simple to grasp, and the executions fall flat due to; products separating, bitter taste of the canna elements, dosing issues, and activation time.
Integration technologies and SOP’s do not exist to make CBD/THC easily put into all the other product hosts that are a part of the future growth and success of the industry.
Mort Aaronson is the Principle at Grey Matter LLC.
Targeted marketing and careful messaging are key to growth
Marketing of cannabis is much simpler and cost-effective than the industry believes creating weak programs that provide little ROI
Proximity-based marketing data identifies just the people that visit cannabis and CBD retailers thereby building a custom audience of pure participants. This creates a haystack of needles vs wasting money on finding the needles in the haystack.
