No bongs in the boardroom
CHANGING THE IMAGE: Stoner cliches sent to the sidelines as marijuana goes corporate
Olivia Mannix, founder of Cannabrand, a Colorado-based company specializing in cannabis product branding, says the pejorative stereotypes associated with pot smoking were its first target.
“First, we take away any of the vernacular such as ‘weed,’ ‘pot,’ ‘ganja.’ In terms of imagery, we skew away from any green leaves or even the word marijuana.”
In the new world order, as Frappucino is to coffee, so “cannabis” will be to weed.
For investors, it’s not about getting high. It’s about getting rich.
Brendan Kennedy, the CEO of Privateer Holdings, a Seattle-based private equity firm that raises capital and invests in the “cannabis space,” brands are not going to emerge as a result of regulatory change, they are going to “fuel the cultural change.”
It’s not ‘Be The Change’ anymore, it’s ‘Brand The Change.’
Several years ago, when Kennedy and his partners Michael Blue and Christian Groh decided to develop a private equity fund and invest in cannabis, investors were leery.
“We set out on this old-fashioned, boots-on-the-ground adventure to go to places like Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, British Columbia, Jamaica, Israel, Spain, the Netherlands, trying to understand the status of the cannabis industry,” Kennedy says.
By the end of their research, which included eight weeks in Canada interviewing everyone from medical cannabis patients to dispensary owners and politicians, they had developed a convincing thesis: Cannabis didn’t have a popularity problem, but still had an image problem.
The argument they were able to bring investors was simple: “Cannabis is a mainstream product consumed by mainstream people around the world. Because of that, the end of prohibition is inevitable, and brands will shape the future of this industry.”
To address the image problem, Privateer, the brand, would look more Wall Street than Haight-Ashbury.
“We set out to create our own brand at Privateer. We chose to wear suits. We weren’t going to use the typical slang words and cliches. We weren’t going to use the leaf all over the place or the colour green.”
Privateer’s brand director Scott Lowry saw marijuana’s image problem as a creative opportunity.
Lowry had come from Heckler, the Seattle agency that did with coffee what Privateer needed for cannabis. Heckler created the Starbucks logo and can claim some responsibility for creating an entirely new coffee culture. When Privateer approached Heckler, Lowry was skeptical, but Kennedy brought in enough research to make his case.
“I remember leaving that meeting and thinking two things: One was, if these guys are right, this is probably the biggest opportunity we’ve seen come through Heckler’s doors since Starbucks,” Lowry said.
It was also a huge branding challenge — and that made it fun.
Lowry eventually left Heckler and joined Privateer as a partner. Like Kennedy, he is careful to couch his affiliation with cannabis by padding it with a context far removed from getting high. “It was my 72-year-old father-in-law who basically told me he was having some health issues, who was telling me cannabis was the best medicine he had,” Lowry says.
“This plant had been demonized for a long time. There were conceptions of the consumer that were fairly inaccurate. So for me from a branding perspective, coming into a situation where you really have some things working against you, and to see how you could really work in a marketplace that had these strong preconceptions (was very appealing).”
Lowry had to figure out how branding could lift cannabis out of the medical niche, fuel the cultural change that would make it as everyday as a Starbucks coffee and attract real investors.
Lowry used Honda’s entry into the U.S. market as an example of how a market could open up simply by changing perceptions of the product and the user.
“Honda came into the American market in the 1950s when motorcycles were associated with gang members and gearheads.”
The company launched a campaign with the tag line ‘You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda.’ The ads featured a mother with a child on a Honda, and even Santa Claus riding their bikes.
“Within four years, they had four times the dealerships that Harley did. To me, it was a really good example of the way a brand had changed the market,” Lowry explains.
He says their research shows a high interest among consumers for understanding of the product, its production and how it will differ from its black market origins. The challenge in pulling down old stereotypes and growing a new culture, one potentially as lucrative as the alcohol industry, is to show, as Honda did, the “nicest people,” people like you and me.
Their first print ad in the New York Times in August 2014, featured a jogger, ponytail bouncing, a businessman with a newspaper folded under his arm, and a tag line that neatly turned pre-conceptions about cannabis on its head: Just Say Know.
No smoke, no bud, no bong — just people happily engaged in positive activities.
“First, we take away any of the vernacular such as ‘weed,’ ‘pot,’ ‘ganja.’ In terms of imagery, we skew away from any green leaves or even the word marijuana.”
— Olivia Mannix