The fast-paced cannabis industry can be especially difficult for retail storefronts as the micromarkets mature, oversaturate or completely redevelop due to changing rules and regulations.
The legwork, vision, overhead and risk involved in opening and maintaining an adult-use or medical cannabis dispensary can be overwhelming. Compliance concerns seemingly occupy all of your time and resources and creating a robust and sustainable brand amidst the chaos sometimes requires making unavoidable mistakes. The inherent stress created by these hard lessons and growing pains.
If you’re wondering if you need a professional dispensary consultant, you probably do. Positioning your brand for success includes the same components whether you are in a mature pioneer market like Washington, Oregon or Colorado or an explosive new hotspot like Oklahoma, Massachusetts. The new wild wests of Canada and California have populations that dwarf existing markets as well as vast geographic and municipal disparities adding to the uncertainty.
The Experience
Just like any retail operation, you need customers consistently coming in the door, new and old, and once they are there, your budtenders two primary goals are giving providing the best possible experience and most appropriate products as well as grooming them to become your brand’s best ambassadors. Unless you are in a highly-travelled destination, it’s well documented that cannabis stores are no exception to the extension of the Pareto principle that 80% of your dispensary’s profits will come from 20% of your customers. Having the most likeable and most knowledgeable representatives behind your counter is more than just good luck in hiring and proper training. If your SOPs are tailored to create exceptional managers and budtenders, the results will speak for themselves.
The Product
If you are not vertically integrated and your supply chain is unreliable, overpriced or otherwise compromising a smooth, bankable inventory process, you need to identify the alternatives based on your localized supply and demand discrepancies. States like Oregon with huge surpluses have made the micromarkets almost collapse in the race to the bottom. Whether or not interstate commerce is in the foreseeable future, the trend will eventually have to move away from flower approaching 30% THC as the general public becomes more educated and just as informed as the connoisseurs. Extraction and cartridge technology has reached a new tipping point from the standpoints of convenience, reliability and quality and will eventually outperform edibles and other MIPs as the leading consumer choice. Craft flower will become the new vinyl as strain names fade and entourage specific blends get their own branding. to has reached the level that it will eventually surpass MIPs as the leading consumer choice.
The Placement
Last but certainly not least, the brand placement component of your dispensary’s business plan should be a subject of daily focus by one or more principles or high-level management. Your marketing efforts should be well-paced marathons instead of sprints and individual aspects considered the living, breathing parts vital to the sustainability of your business. Digital marketing is very difficult to integrate seamlessly across all the necessary platforms, but it you are not optimized and correctly-listed across the spectrum of Google, Bing, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp, Leafly, weedmaps, et cetera, you are leaving money on the table.
