Managing the Consumer, User, or Patient Experience

As you set out to launch a cannabis brand or business, there’s a variety of critical considerations to ensure a team’s success. One of the most critical factors, if not the MOST important, is tuning into the customer. For it’s because of said customer, you actually have a business, a product to sell and a purpose for being.

So what can we do, as a collective group of industry operators, to tune into this all-important target and help manage the cannabis experience?

That’s a lot to ask right out of the gate. For many of us, we’re simply trying to operate proficiently. Given the cannabis sector is such a nascent industry, simply successfully navigating the varied and foreign landscape of legal and compliance requirements is a huge win.

But it’s ok. We’ve got this.

The good news is many operators in the cannabis industry are in the same boat. By virtue of being a work-in-progress product category, cannabis industry leaders tend to lean in to help one another, compare experiences and draw from former regulated industry insights. There are lessons to be learned from companies and markets that are further along and generally more grounded in experience than others. Those industry professionals in more established positions are usually receptive to sharing what they’ve learned to guide newbies along.

Now that the cannabis industry is gaining much more acceptance, momentum and traction on a global scale, there’s a sense of urgency that has entrenched itself in managing the user experience with cannabis. With this increased traction, it’s more important than ever to answer the question “how do we manage the user experience?”

There’s a sense of urgency. Or is it responsibility?

Maybe it’s more than simply a sense of urgency to answer this question. One might go further to express a sense of personal responsibility. We owe it to our consumers and patients to do and be more, to be accountable for what we’re putting out into the marketplace and to whom we market our products.

For the first time ever in the legal cannabis industry, 2020 brings an even more diverse range of consumers and patients into the space. And many of these consumers are just now being introduced to the consumption of cannabis in a true consumer packaged goods or CPG sense. Even if they’re not new to cannabis, they might very well be tainted from a spotty user experience in the backseat of someone’s car, a batch of brownies gone wrong, or a smoke-filled, backyard jam session.

Let’s be accountable as operators first and foremost, if not for ourselves, our employees and our business partners, for our consumers.

Things have changed. Times have changed.

We could start this exercise by looking at the typical patient or user profile, yet there isn’t a definitive one that exists. At this point, the audience profile is scattered and obscure at best. There is no concrete, baseline understanding as to who retailers and brands are targeting and for what specific products in particular. Many of the users coming into the space are brand new to cannabis – especially consumer packaged goods (CPG) products.

As a result, even if the typical user profile was defined, those cannabis consumers aren’t overly sophisticated buyers. Legal CPG products are newer to the scene, not widely distributed, inconsistent from market to market, and formulas continue to evolve with technology (and technology continues to evolve).

Outcry for education

In the interim, there’s an outcry for a radical shift in cannabis education on multiple levels. Everyone seems to be seeking a platform of knowledge that shows proof of dosing as well as impact, pre-clinical or clinical evidence that products work as intended (or work for specific conditions).

Consumers and patients want to know how their bodies will react to cannabis. Marketers and product developers seek FDA guidance and a regulatory framework. Retailers and cannabis brands crave an intelligence-gathering model to know who’s buying what products, purchase behaviors of consumers and patient profile demographics.

As cannabis industry operators, we need to answer the outcry for education to help carefully manage the consumer experience. I’d argue you can do more than simply manage the experience; you can take control of it so you can actually craft or curate that user experience.

Three Steps to Effectively Craft the Consumer Experience

Step One: Ingrain it into Your Culture

As always, this effort must be an investment from the top down. Many companies talk about how training and education is a priority, however, it’s rarely fully demonstrated or put into a pervasive practice. There’s a big disconnect between “providing a training program” and fully reviewing it for hyper-relevant content as well as effective training delivery systems. Don’t forget to establish criteria for success and then execute on it to the highest degree.

To do this right, training and education has to be part of every new hire onboarding plan, customized by employee and position. What are you hoping your employee learns in the first 90 days and how will you measure success? What key stakeholders should an employee meet with and what should s/he hope to learn from those meetings? What cannabis products, services and/or business practices should your new hire know about and how will s/he learn about them? Have you shared an organizational chart and walked through how the company does business, makes money and how s/he can contribute?

If training and education is ingrained into your company culture, this naturally is embraced throughout the customer’s journey with your organization. Employees will be knowledgeable and feel comfortable, even empowered, to educate patients — passing along that knowledge about how products are designed and what active ingredients make an impact. The products you represent will be designed with the end in mind — your consumer and the desired user experience.

How will you coach front-line teams to pass along the knowledge they’ve learned to customers? Can you implement a self-guided learning tutorial inside your retail location? Will you employ brand ambassadors and in-store pop-ups to speak directly to patients about product benefits and good manufacturing processes? Does your website provide specific educational content?

If we start with the belief that knowledge is power, we can enable both our teams and customers to truly succeed. By succeed, I mean instilling the knowledge in employees to provide proper guidance to patients and, as a consumer, feeling in control of the intended user experience.

Step Two: Operate Responsibly

To build consumer trust, always work within the legal framework and with full transparency to provide a high degree of confidence in your operations. Adopt reliable business practices, processes and services; then make sure you communicate those to business partners and consumers. Start by designing products, sourcing ingredients and manufacturing products in an ethical manner that are not only useful, but provide a true solution to problems or conditions that exist.

While you can’t provide medical guidance to patients, you can provide clear labeling and an understanding of dosing guidelines. You want consumers to “know your dose” and that’s challenging in the cannabis industry right now. Oftentimes with cannabis products, you don’t know what you don’t know and how it will impact your body.

Yet another reason why education is so paramount to success in the cannabis sector. We simply have to work around the fact that there aren’t physicians writing prescriptions for specific, approved indications that provide dosing and usage instructions as it exists in the pharmaceutical space.

With other federally regulated substances such as alcohol, you generally have a baseline understanding and common knowledge as to how it impacts your body, how much you can tolerate, and how you’ll feel when you wake up the next day. The experience with cannabis doesn’t mirror the experience with alcohol beverages. To be more comfortable with consumption of cannabis CPG products, consumers must get familiar with what to expect.

Precise dosing, communicated clearly, along with education, gets the cannabis industry one step closer to providing a greater degree of predictability. Consumers and patients are putting their trust in you, your people and your systems. You owe it to them to operate legally, compliantly and with full transparency.

Step Three: Listen to Your Customers

Finally, explore what consumers need in order to best manage their trial of and experiences with cannabis CPG products. Once your team is on board and you’ve aligned on your goals, lean into proven technologies right from the start to provide baseline metrics and fuel future innovation.

Put feedback systems in place to listen to what your customers are saying about your business, your service and the products sold at retail or online. That may mean establishing a loyalty program to glean customer data; leaning into texting and email platforms to gain feedback after product purchase; installing immediate feedback mechanisms near retail exits (such as Happy or Not push button stations); and/or establishing a call center or dedicated response email to provide an outlet for feedback.

Don’t forget about your front line employees, too, as they’re a direct conduit to consumers. So much of the experience feedback can be gained by staying close to front line employees. This public-facing team of wellness experts and educators is truly the voice of the customer. As a manufacturer, CPG brand and/or retailer, your goal is to stay in sync with the front line team. This important team has feedback on how people perceive your brand, the effectiveness, taste and consistency of the product, and a groundswell of innovation ideas.

Education is paramount to gaining traction.

As industry operators strive to mainstream cannabis, consumer education is paramount to gaining traction in this nascent industry. Patients need to get familiar with terminology and various CPG product forms to understand how, when and where they fully have an impact on their bodies. Consumers of any kind will increasingly rely on information related to CPG product reliability, testing and effectiveness when making decisions about what products to try and what products to recommend to others.

Let’s work together today to create an educational platform to effectively manage and craft the cannabis experience of tomorrow.

About Julie Suntrup

Based in Denver, CO and originally from St. Louis, MO, Julie’s goal is to mainstream cannabis by designing truly differentiated brands that consumers (or patients) both understand and trust. As Chief Growth Officer at Day Three Labs (DTL), Julie specializes in CPG product innovation, leveraging the insights and cannabis plant study knowledge of DTL’s Israel-based researchers and scientists. Coupled with advanced use of technology and product validation, DTL develops sophisticated cannabinoid products that work as intended. You can reach Julie Suntrup @ [email protected] or 314.853.9579.

Complimentary CPG Product Design Consulting Services

Now through December 31, 2020, Day Three Labs (DTL)  is offering complimentary product design consulting services to anyone holding a Missouri cannabis license. Let DTL help you and your R&D team create a cost-effective route to product innovation by designing a CPG product pipeline for 2021 and beyond — or simply solve a specific problem with existing products, such as: taste profile, duration/onset of effect, clarity, consistency, water solubility, shelf life stability, or rapid bioavailability. Learn more at: http://daythreelabs.com/. For a complimentary consultation, please contact Julie Suntrup at [email protected] or 314.853.9579.