🏪 Digital Trade Marketing

A handsome man made a good point on LinkedIn recently:

At Jane, we’ve been focused on the concept of ‘digital trade marketing’ - i.e. how brands can retain their presence (and their essence) in a digital environment, the same way they do in stores.

🍻 Beer Does It Best

As we are faced with more and more complex CPG issues in cannabis, it is often useful to turn to an established industry and see how things have been done in the past.

For CPG, beer is the gold standard of in-store merchandising. Let’s go on an adventure together, and see how in-store executions can (or should) be translated to the digital world.

🏢 Space...the final frontier

Trade marketing efforts, as noted by the handsome LinkedIn man, should increase demand from retailers and guarantee space.

If you leverage space well, you can engage the shopper and also fulfill your retailer’s goal - which is, ultimately, to sell more stuff.

Take a gander at some of the displays I had the pleasure of helping build in my time at Anheuser-Busch:

(Quick note: I would often go “into the trade” during my stint as a district manager for Anheuser-Busch to help merchandise stores; I was, hands down, the worst merchandiser across all of the distributors I covered. I once dropped a stack of 36-pack Bud family cases from a poorly-packed dolly in the entryway of a Rite Aid in Moorpark, CA, on the Friday before the SuperBowl. The cases exploded, showering me and four of my sales reps with that famous golden lager, and ruining several rows of nearby packaged goods. The store had to shut down for an hour-long cleanup. I was not invited back.)

🛣 Featured in the beer aisle

AB did a phenomenal job of leveraging large, engaging displays around key holidays. Look at the cooler behind the display; it is planogrammed to death (meaning the amount of space for each brand is predetermined).

When given the chance to prioritize your brand in your own section, away from the planogrammed cooler, go big. This one ^ is a great example of a pattern interruptor: you enter the beer aisle with some kind of purchase in mind based on your profile and “usage occasion” - then you are smacked in the face with a huge, creative display. Maybe you went in that aisle to buy wine for your dinner party, but were then reminded that you were having people over for the game on Sunday and should probably stock up on beer.

How it relates to online cannabis shopping 🌱

The “beer aisle,” in this analogy, is the dispensary menu - where people go to find, shop for, and purchase cannabis. The pattern interruptors can be any number of things, from attention-grabbing packaging so your digital product cards stand out in your category, to priority placements at the top of menus so you are the first thing shoppers see when they enter the “aisle.”

Soon, brands will have more levers to pull within these eCommerce environments: e.g. videos for storytelling, or entire digital installations to really unpack the brand’s value proposition.

🍾 Featured on the floor

Now - how about outside of the beer aisle? How can we engage with shoppers when they aren’t even thinking of beer yet?

This heart-shaped Stella display takes advantage of Valentine’s Day impulse shoppers, who may just need a balloon (or at least a reminder that it is, in fact, Valentine’s Day). As it turns out, consumer behavior data shows that Stella purchases often go hand in hand with romantic occasions, so the pairing makes sense.

How it relates to online cannabis shopping 🌱

Have you ever been served an ad for Weedmaps, Columbia Care dispensaries, a local delivery service, Papa and Barkley products, etc., while you go about your business on other, non-cannabis websites? Same idea. Programmatic campaigns can serve targeted cannabis brand messaging as you do something unrelated online.

This “out-of-section” dynamic also plays out within dispensary sites, on pages other than the menu. It’s relatively easy to display beautiful products on various pages on the site that, when clicked, direct back to a pre-filtered menu for purchase.

⚔️ Cross-merch

Cross-merchandising is pairing two complementary products together, in the hopes that they’ll be purchased together. Beer and meat, beer and chips, beer and wine. Stella played as a more sophisticated brew, so it was often effectively cross-merchandised with wine.

How it relates to online cannabis shopping 🌱

This is a relatively simple one, but requires a bit of data - what two or three items are often bundled together? Create a few BOGO specials and pump up the volume. Or, better yet, rely on your eComm tech to automate suggested up-sells in real time.

📚 tl;dr

• “Digital trade marketing” translates best practices from in-store executions to online environments

• We can learn from beer, the kings of in-store merchandising

• Features in the aisle, features on the floor, and cross-merchandising all have analogues in cannabis eCommerce

• I am a bad merchandiser

• It is Thursday