📓 ...what do you want?

Retailers and brands, in all verticals, obsess about what their customers actually want. They measure and they infer and they (sometimes) outright spy on customers in order to hone their offering to accommodate their target audience.

Cannabis is no different. If anything, the urge to define and target the “cannabis consumer” is more intense than in most other verticals, because the consumer segment is large, diverse, and flush with cash.

There are numerous ways to determine what your customers actually like - here are some that I wrote down for you:

🤷‍♀️ Ask Them Directly

The most obvious of my recommendations is also probably the oldest one. Since manufacturers began making consumer products, and retailers began selling them to the public, the good ol’ fashioned survey has been prevalent.

Nowadays, it is less about postcard-sized forms that a customer fills out after buying your stuff - and perhaps less than post-experience phone reviews, though my bank always asks me to provide that kind of feedback - and much more about automated, digital aggregation of opinions.

The verified product review - the greatest all of the digital tools for retailers and brands. Real people who actually bought your products - outright telling you how they felt about them. 🤌

If you cannot inherit and display verified product review data - you are drastically behind the market. It WILL negatively impact your conversion rate, and also make you look like you aren’t paying attention to how people shop.

💸 Look at what they bought

“What they want” has a very high correlation with “what they bought.”

So…what did they buy?

You should have immediate access to all of your transaction data - and the data should be clean and standardized. All too often, brand builders and purchasing managers are relying on incomplete, non-standardized, and dirty data to make decisions - use a good eComm partner or a data company to clean it up to make it useful.

🔦 See what they are voting for via search and filters

Working with good eCommerce companies brings a lot of joys to cannabis retailers and brands. Automated processes, high conversion rates, and - information on what your customers are voting for.

Every time a customer searches for a keyword - a brand, a category, whatever - they are voting for something of interest. They intend to at least explore (and perhaps even buy) that product.

As a wild but interesting tangent, here are the top search terms in Illinois:

• Shake

• Flower

• Edible

• RSO

• Vape

• PAX

Had to get to #6 before seeing a brand name; this is a market with an obsession with access to various form factors of cannabis, and not yet with brands (which makes sense given their relatively young adult-use market).

📲 Collect info from them in exchange for special treatment

Loyalty programs are phenomenal platforms for brand building - and for getting to know your customer.

Customers will happily venture key demographic information (age, gender, location, occupation, etc.) as well as their product preferences in exchange for a few discounts and freebies.

Are they a 35-year-old man in Southern California that likes Wyld gummies and works in cannabis software? Or are they a 23-year-old woman from Naperville who smokes an eighth of top shelf flower every three days and heads a graphic design company? Either way, give them 10% off on payday and a 50% discount on their birthday, because they just provided valuable information on what they want today, and what they might want in the future.

📚 tl;dr

• Retailers and brands want to know what their customers really want, in order to better tailor their offerings

• In order to get a handle on what your customers want,

  • Ask them directly via verified product reviews

  • Review their purchases with clean data

  • Determine what they are voting for via searches and filters

  • Collect their key likes / dislikes via loyalty programs

• It is Thursday