ARTICLE CREATING BRAND DESIGN (CBD)
HOW TO CREATE A SUCCESSFUL PRODUCT LINE Wirtten By
Ralph Morgan
Collective hemp brands
With over 25 years of brand experience, I wanted to pass on tips about identifying markets, reaching consumers, and designing successful brands. A few fundamentals follow: Market Research and Identification Some people fall in love with the idea of a product, and create this product hoping the market likes it.Rather than hoping the market loves your idea for a product, fall in love with the thoughtful solution to an unmet consumer demand. That’s what happened with OrganaLabs and bringing CO2 extraction to the cannabis industry. In this new industry, concentrates lacked consistency and quality, and often contained residual solvents. We invested in CO2 technology to safely and organically extract oil from the plant, offering products that were safe and reliable. I hadn’t previously been passionate about CO2 extraction, but it filled the identified need in the market so well, I fell in love with the solution. Encountering Challenges The greater the challenge, the greater the potential reward awaits those that have effectively addressed it. In the CBD space, consumer education is
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a profound challenge due to the amount of misinformation, lack of clinical studies, and validated anecdotal information. Collective Hemp Brands has partnered with an M.D. and cannabis expert to communicate timely information from a trusted healthcare professional. We have also deployed a consumer facing app to which we invite both end users and healthcare professionals to share information and participate in live communal discourse. This communication hub will help establish standards and protocols for future cannabinoid therapies, not only from practitioners but from actual consumer experiences to increase a positive patient outcome. This tool is the first we know that addresses the standardization process with total transparency. Tackling the challenges in consumer education head on allows us to proactively participate in establishing protocols for how best to use cannabinoids for wellness. Looking Ahead Expense was the main reasons CO2 extraction hadn’t been widely adopted as a solution. We invested
in this expensive process, knowing it created a high water mark of quality. Competitors then had to defend their extraction methods against this new standard. If you can attack the hardest challenges early and find viable resolutions, competition is then forced to follow. Your answer to the industry pain point becomes your unique selling proposition. Understanding Regulatory Compliance If you can turn the biggest regulatory challenges into your unique brand benefits, that liability becomes an asset. Packaging requirements for cannabis products are onerous. Test results must be on the outside of the packaging, which is difficult given the small size of many products. At O.Pen Vape we utilized an expanding label. Instead of using microscopic type, our expanding label allowed us to legibly deliver the information to the consumer in a way that could be both read and understood.
