Take a minute to think of your favorite brands. What characteristics do you associate with them?

These are just a few examples; the brand associations could be any of these—or plenty of others. More importantly, these are all characteristics you may want your customers and prospects to think of when they think of your brand.

Foundationally, your dispensary branding strategy should build a connection between your dispensary and your customers. Sound easy? Not exactly.

Few brands — including dispensary brands — manage to achieve these positive associations. With the cannabis industry booming and becoming increasingly competitive, it’s critical that you develop a cohesive and executable dispensary branding strategy to be heard above the noise.

Branding strategy is a massive topic that can’t be covered in a single piece. To ensure we give you plenty of great info, we’re going to address the essential components of a profitable dispensary branding strategy over several articles. In this article — Part I of a X part series — we’ll look at foundational branding issues like defining and understanding who your target audience is, communicating your dispensary’s mission and vision, and naming.

Your Target Audience: Start by Creating Customer Personas

If you identify your target customers as “anyone and everyone between 20 and 60,” you’re going way too broad. What you’re saying is, “I’m not exactly sure who our target audience is.” “Everyone” is not your target audience. This may be an extreme example, but it’s far more common than you’d think.

When you’re creating a brand, you need a unique voice, and you need to speak to a narrowly defined target audience. To target a specific audience, you should start by creating personas.

What are personas? A persona is simply a model you create that (very) narrowly represents your target customer. Personas help you identify who you’re targeting (based on demographics, personal histories, expectations); what their needs and buying motivations are; what their customer journey looks like (from interest to purchase to brand loyalty and brand advocacy); and how your brand fits into their life. Most likely, you’ll need to create several personas to cover the different customers you’re aiming to serve.

A persona contains information about:
‍

Let’s use “soccer mom” as an example persona since most people are already familiar with this persona. While this persona encompasses a group, it is written in the singular. This helps create a more personal, dynamic feel and may help you better envision (and empathize with) your target customer. You can even name your persona if you wish.

Demographics: Late 20s to mid-40s; college-educated; suburban; affluent.

‍Personal Histories: She leads a health-conscious life and is active, though she also enjoys wine with her girlfriends. Before legalization, she hasn’t used cannabis since college. Her goals are both therapeutically and socially-motivated. She wants to treat insomnia, stress and anxiety, or pain. She also likes the social aspect that legal cannabis brings with products like vapes and chocolate edibles — products she doesn’t have to smoke.

‍Expectations: She’s looking for dispensaries that provide a spa-like or Apple Store experience. Price is far less important to her than quality and experience — she’ll gladly pay a premium (or drive further) to go to dispensaries where she feels comfortable and which carry organic or top-shelf products. She wants knowledgeable and approachable budtenders who can direct her to products that are uplifting, uninhibiting, and, in the case of edibles, tasty (particularly artisan chocolates). Once she finds a dispensary or brands that she loves, she can become very brand-loyal to the point of becoming a brand advocate.

Dispensary Branding: Communicating Mission, Vision, and Values

If you don’t know what the difference is between a mission statement and a vision statement, don’t fret! Most people get confused or think the two terms are interchangeable.

Here’s a simple way to remember the difference:

Mission = Now

Vision = Future

Do you need to create two completely different statements? Not necessarily, and there are advantages to combining the two. For a retail dispensary, few people are going to visit two pages — which you see all too often.

To get an idea of mission and vision statements, let’s look at Apple. Everyone loves Apple. Well, maybe not everyone. But, a heck of a lot of people do. Using them as a case study, we’ll look at their “official” mission statement (that they announced during a recent earnings report). It’s bafflingly awful. It sounds like something that would come out of a junior college Marketing 101 class. Predictably, it made a lot of savvy marketers cringe.

Here it goes:

“Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.”

Boring, isn’t it? We’re not sure exactly who created that mission statement, but it doesn’t sound like Steve Jobs or even current CEO Tim Cook. Let’s contrast that mission statement with previous statements from Jobs and Cook:

Before we dig deeper into visual design and identity, let’s start with the basics: the differences between branding and visual identity:

Branding: Here’s how Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, describes branding: “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room.” That’s an oversimplification, but it’s a useful big-picture way to conceptualize branding.

Branding guru, Seth Godin, expands on this definition:

Godin explains that your brand is the sum total of consumers’ willingness to pay a premium for your offering; their perspective on how your brand meets or exceeds expectations over your competition; how often they’ll choose your brand over other brands; and the relationship and connections they have to your brand.

Visual Identity: Your visual identity is how you communicate your brand’s personality and how you extend your personality and values through your branded elements. This includes every visual aspect of your brand that you create to communicate what your brand represents. Your visual branding assets should communicate and reinforce the feelings you want your customers to have when they engage with your brand.

Visual identity includes all of the following (and any other kind of visuals your dispensary creates):

Dispensary Local SEO and Your Google Business Profile

Local SEO strategy is centered around the geographical location of your dispensary so that your website is optimized to be found in local search results. Like the SEO tactics we’ve highlighted already, local SEO will also increase the traffic to and visibility of your website—but if you’re a brick-and-mortar retailer, it can also help bring more customers through your door, too.

About 98% of consumers used the internet to find information about local businesses over the last year, and 28% of local searches on mobile devices resulted in a purchase within 24 hours.

Local SEO considers the types of searches your local customers are conducting and works to ensure that all local signals you provide to Google—from your Google Business Profile to local citations—are consistent and correct. Effective local SEO allows customers to find information about your dispensary quickly and easily by helping to enhance your organic visibility for local search queries and improving your rank within the Local Map Pack.

Bottom line: Branding is macro and visionary. Visual identity is micro and tactical.

One of the biggest mistakes cannabis dispensary marketers make is to view a logo as their dispensary’s brand. Yes, your logo is vitally important to your brand, but it’s only one component of a larger whole. Branding goes above and beyond your logo, but given how influential a logo can be on how your customers remember and think of you, let’s talk about logo first.

If you look at website design and marketing collateral from other dispensaries, you’ll often find copy that’s disjointed and lacking cohesion. The tonality and voice vary considerably from asset to asset. Usually, this is because most dispensaries have several people writing copy, including internal staff and contractors. And no one took the time to define how the brand should be represented in written materials. Consequently, when anyone writes copy, they’re operating in isolation without clear guidance.

To ensure cohesion across your written assets, make sure to put together a copywriting document that provides clear guidelines on how you want your brand represented. Also, make sure when you hire copywriters, you work closely with them to provide feedback. Most companies hire writers and then divorce themselves from the process. Big mistake! Only you know exactly how you want your brand represented.

Your guidelines should:

Here are the essentials you should include in your Brand Style Guide: