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The cannabis industry continues to grow at an alarming rate.  With new businesses, and products popping up daily it is more important then ever to focus on your brand.  From consumer packaging, online marketing, consumer electronic marketing, trade marketing and more your brand messaging plays an integral part in building a brand consumers know. Harry Brelsford of The CannaTech Group sits down with Eric Meth of Surfside to discuss brand marketing.

Video Transcription

Harry Brelsford 

Good Hey, welcome back to the Canna tech podcast. We’re back with one of our rotating analysts Eric meth over at Surfside. How’re you doing, Eric?

Eric Meth 

I’m great. How are you? Hey, Ben. It’s good. Good to be back on the show. We’ll call this Boomer a boomerang interview.

Harry Brelsford 

Yeah, there we go. Yes, it’s a fast summer. So let’s jump right into it. Brands. You had some thoughts on brands what you heard what you’ve seen go.

Eric Meth 

Yeah, it’s this is this is the this is this is the part where I thought it was three years too early. Now just on time. What I mean by that is my my, as we talked last time, my history has really been more focused around consumer packaged goods, marketing, consumer electronics, fast moving consumer goods. My my original Inception point of taking all that institutional knowledge and applying it to the cannabis space. Several years ago, talk about like 2017 you ever take, no one was thinking that way in the cannabis space. Now suddenly, they are and it seems like 2022 has been this epiphany, all across the industry, you have the brand marketers, the brand and wholesalers, as well as the MultiState operators, all expanding their own brand lines, not just within the four walls of their stores, but across entire markets that they operate in, and even doing licensing deals in markets that they’re not fully boots on the ground with. So with that, comes the brand marketing and the trade marketing element which Surfside actually launched a Co Op program several months ago, which has been doing well, we have a couple of case studies that we’ve been able to produce, with the whole concept really not just focusing on putting a brand message out into the market, but really focusing your brand message and partnering with specific retailers. So we’re we have the ability to canvass the market, like we usually do drive people into retail locations, drive them online to purchase. Now we’re taking that a step further, like traditional consumer packaged goods, companies like General Mills, and Mondelez. and the like. All do every day you walk into a supermarket, tons of on site advertising, at the point of purchase, all directing traffic to that final sale. Because once you get in the store, very easy to get distracted. So keeping that focus, while people are that outside consideration set all the way through that store purchase visit to that literal point of sale is really what we’re seeing happen within the cannabis space now. Yeah,

Harry Brelsford 

yeah, no kidding. Yeah, I’m hearing more about the brand conversation. Are you able to name one or two brands you’re working with? Or is it still under wraps?

Eric Meth 

No, no. We’re doing we’re doing some programs with Mary Med and a few of their brand like Betty’s case study that I referenced, which I can make available and we could we could publish out to your your listening group was with Trulieve and live well, that was that was very concentrated program took place a month after 420. So we looked at like May, which typically is a declining month. And they were looking for ways to boost a specific product line, they have a relatively new they product line called colors. Which is co2 infused or co2, co2, co2 extracted vape cartridges with flavor profiles, etc. But the key point was we really work with their wholesale team. And it was really good product that’s checked all the boxes, we were responsible for finding those vape consumers concentrate consumers within multiple dma’s within Colorado in and around the 22 liberal locations. And it was really designed to direct store traffic as well as online traffic to the live well site to encourage purchase. We saw net effect was about an 80% month over month with a little over about a 5x return on adspend for the campaign. And the this was a quoted in the given the case study but the initial reaction we got from both sides was in an otherwise crappy May. This was a really good bright spot. So even with looking at the bumps that they got for for 20 we were able to create a sustained lift for those specific products in the market. So happy to share that case study out

Harry Brelsford 

to me, and we’ll make it part of the presentation. Hey, got one minute left. What shows are we going to see at this fall? Oh, it’s showtime.

Eric Meth 

Yeah. Namely, I’ll be up next week, the Hall of flowers event in Toronto. With a few of our folks. Mostly just running around meeting people will have pretty big presence at Harlow flowers in Santa Rosa in October. month later, we’ll obviously be at mjbizcon kind of canvassing canvassing the whole lot. So between the show floor, we’ll have a suite of Cosmo taking meetings. We’d love to get together with anyone. Then a couple of small events that we’ll do some interaction with will be a deacon, this coming weekend in Atlantic City as well.

Harry Brelsford 

All right, well, hey, keep me on the shortlist. If that you turn that sweet into a party zone. I want to get past the rope line.

Eric Meth 

Yeah, of course. Of course. 1010 Like no one no one starts these meetings before 10. So like tend to spy is pretty much meeting time. Five o’clock. We opened it up for fun and happy hour and dinner. So all right, we’ll have we’ll have we’ll have your invite way to carry.

Harry Brelsford 

All right now. I’m looking forward to seeing you. Thanks for hanging in there with us.

Eric Meth 

Thanks very curious. All right. Bye bye.