While branding targets the heart, marketing efforts target the mind. Branding is nothing more than a person’s emotional connection to your company, product, service, or idea. Marketing is the things you do to make that connection.
It is a fascinating soft science that is more psychology than anything. It’s so interesting to me that I went back to Sonoma State University at age 32 to study it, eventually getting a BA in marketing then an MBA with a concentration in marketing and international business (abd). I was always tweaking my branding and marketing efforts, a continuous improvement process usually applied to production.
The fundamentals of Marketing are the same, branding and framing, whether selling products or ideas. As in most things, control the definition to control the space. First one to frame an issue controls it.
Marketing is just telling people your narrative, authentic modern story-telling. You want to do it in as efficient a way as possible; in the old days that was magazine ads, store POP and demos, and direct mail. Today it’s social media, websites, QR codes, viral videos, Influencers, affiliate marketing, sales funnels, automation (how do you think I did 10,000 Tweets/year?), chatbots, pop-up surveys, online games, fan clubs, exclusive deals and content, premium membership, subscriptions, Web3, AI, ChatGPT, Venmo, Patreon, Cash App, PayPal, SMS, FB Messenger and WhatsApp marketing, and more. But at the end of the day, it’s all the same: talking to people, telling them your story.
But since it is your story, it must be authentic. If you’re not a hippie then don’t call it Hippie Hemp. If you’re not a Native American, don’t call it Chief Hemp. Be you, no one else is doing that yet. Many brands have shot themselves in the foot by pretending to be something they are not. While some are quite skilled at it, ultimately it feels fake and the brand suffers. Be bold, sell your authentic narrative. Embrace your uniqueness and watch the buzz grow. Social media made that exponentially easier and cheaper, pre-internet was like the Dark Ages for Marketing compared to today. The options and tools available today are numerous, use them.
Branders make objects which never have existence come to “life.” They create from nothing a personality and identity for you to relate to positively. Names and backstory and ideas and concepts and values and aspirations and tribalism and new nomenclature, all done authentically (that is if you’re good, any child can just make shit up). Leveraging neuroscience, Branders know what you think of something before you do. Whether a product, service, politician, idea, or cause, in the end it’s all just “widgets” to a Brander. Marketers make all that so. Sales is the boots on the ground, store shelves are the trenches where battle is waged.
Frankly, at the end of the day, Marketing is just Social Engineering. Inventor of modern Marketing, Edward Bernays, made a career on that simple fact as did every other great Marketer since. Although Bernays got women to start smoking cigarettes Social Engineering isn’t necessarily bad, it depends on what are the effects of its use. For instance, that’s how we people first came to accept HempRella with its neon-green pot leaf and HEMP on thousands of store shelves, then Prop 215, then the normalization of medical Cannabis and eventually Adult-use. It was Social Engineering put to good, or if you prefer, “Marketing.” Another example of “Business = Activism” at work, use your business to do well by doing good.
Good marketing can make a lame product succeed, but not the reverse. Craft an authentic story for your brand to tell using words, colors, and images. Humor is a powerful tool in marketing. I’m a jester so it naturally came through in my marketing. Find a way to turn your negatives into positives. Be the real you, people might like it.
Marketing is more powerful than religion (which has long used marketing to sell itself) and the government (ditto). The cognitive dissonance of watching intelligent people “vote against their interest” by buying more-expensive products for seemingly no compelling reason is what sent me back to university to study Consumer Behavior.
Don’t just start a Brand, start a Movement. The father of Marketing, Edward Bernays, originally called the field “propaganda.” Women’s Lib was brought to you by Lucky Strike. “Ladies, light a torch for freedom with Lucky Strike, and stick it to the Patriarchy. It’s not just for loose women anymore!”
“Intrigued by Freud’s notion that irrational forces drive human behavior, Bernays sought to harness those forces to sell products for his clients. In his 1928 book, “Propaganda,” Bernays hypothesized that by understanding the group mind, it would be possible to manipulate people’s behavior without their even realizing it. To test this hypothesis, Bernays launched one of his most famous public relations campaigns: convincing women to smoke cigarettes.
Bernays consulted a leading psychoanalyst and Freud disciple. When asked what cigarettes symbolized to women, Brill’s response was that cigarettes were symbolic of male power. Equating smoking with challenging male power was the cornerstone of cigarette brand Lucky Strike’s “Torches of Freedom” campaign, which debuted during New York’s annual Easter Parade on April 1, 1929. The press was warned beforehand and couldn’t resist the story. The “Torches of Freedom Parade” was covered not only by the local papers, but also by newspapers nationwide and internationally.
Bernays was convinced that linking products to emotions could cause people to behave irrationally. In reality, of course, women were no freer for having taken up smoking, but linking smoking to women’s rights fostered a feeling of independence.”
Or start new sports that the camera loves, like Red Bull and GoPro did.
To market, use every tool at your disposal. Public Relations and advertising, social media, brand ambassadors, online funnels, samples, demos, fairs and festivals, events… whatever you see as a legitimate, ethical opportunity to advance your cause. Always look for opportunities to give away free recipes, cents-off coupons, brochures, and the like. Write a cookbook or three. Sponsor a cooking competition at the local county and state fairs. While some complain they can’t advertise on social media if hemp, that’s not true; there are many workarounds… learn them. Find emerging platforms, such as TikTok, and develop tools like your own app. Pioneer the next big thing in marketing, which today might be built on the last “next big thing.”
Jargon: “demographics“ are what people are, such as “married female aged 18-35 with a Master’s Degree living in an urban area,” and “psychographics“ are what people think, such as “left-leaning Protestant voting blue who is against guns.”
Neoliberal Marketing is “buy our product so we can heal the woes of the world instead of you actually working to fix things.” Conscience balm from Patagonia, Whole Foods, Dr. Bronner’s, et al. If borrowed from actual authentic marketers, I call it “Fauxthentic Marketing.”
Neoliberalism itself assumes economic growth promotes well-being, that the state should relinquish its responsibilities to the private sector, and that a market free from government interference always generates the best outcome. That’s a load of crap, of course, the powers that be are far from trustable or humane, it’s proven often that big companies can steal and kill you with impunity with tainted liquor, tainted food, and tainted financial instruments.
As one of the first authentic proponents of this style of marketing in 1988 with a self-imposed “Green Tax” funding our corporate philanthropy, I think it is today in danger of back-firing because so many are using it thus it is losing its luster and efficacy, especially when BP and Shell tell us how committed to the environment they are, and other unbelievable ads from other unbelievable companies.
One authentic Neoliberal marketing tool could be to give away or sell at cost packaged shelled hempseed as a disaster food.
Is your business highly profitable? Then start a foundation and use pre-tax dollars to do Neoliberal Marketing with your name on it, all on the taxpayer’s dime legally.
Target one consumer segment and position your branding for it, you can’t be all things to all people all the time.
The total market grows over time. When I started in 1980 the population of the U.S. was 226 million; today it is 333 million or 47% larger. And the consumers making up that market have more money to spend.
Even a nonprofit needs marketing help; one devoted to child safety put a yellow and red warning graphic with an exclamation point on a THC product that actually made it look more inviting to children instead of repelling. There’s a reason fast food businesses catering to children use those colors, but the nonprofit didn’t want to hear why it was bad execution, nor even why. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, again.
If you want to control the world’s narrative about your company, you need a Press Kit; that’s what good reporters work off of. Today, it could be done electronically, online, but it should be an integral part of your marketing efforts, where you send reporters to understand you. Tell your story authentically and humorously, or soberly, or matter-of-factly, or expertly, or whatever expresses the essence of your company.
Like B Corp status, organic, kosher, halal, and fair trade, most certifications are just marketing tools. After the two least-ethical companies I know were certified, I did the B Corp assessment using the policies of the Nazi Party and then the Sinaloa Cartel; both rated quite high. One certification scheme, TestPledge, was designed by lawyers to be an outright fraud upon consumers and the trade. Getting ripped off by a B Corp actually feels worse than getting ripped off by a non-socially-responsible corporation. At least evil defense contractors don’t pretend to be something they aren’t.
As Benito Mussolini or Donald Trump would tell you, love is a powerful emotion but hate is overwhelming. With enough hate, you can take over a nation and kill millions of its people. You can rule most of the world or at least make a good run at it. You can become fabulously rich and famous. While hate could make you wealthy, the hit your psyche will take is bigger. Hate is not a sustainable USP for a Brand. However, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t consider being cheeky as a marketing tool. If you’re not polarizing in some way, you’re not interesting. The best brands have lovers & haters but one thing is for sure, they’re unforgettable.
This is one way to grow your business via collaborations; license your brand name for co-marketing and build a brand alliance. Every aspect of your business dictates your branding, whether you know it or not. Colors, fonts, positioning, type of package, words, price… it’s all a part of your branding and affects how people perceive your company or product. Even the music on hold at Rella was part of our branding, rockin’ electric blues. More than once we picked up a call just to be told to “put me back on hold” so they could hear the rest of the song.
Here are some of the hemp food marketing tricks I used long ago and far, far away:
Put an inch-and-a-half high neon-green 7-finger marijuana leaf on a dark purple background and the word HEMP just as big on the shelf of thousands of supermarkets and natural food stores in both the U.S. and Canada as far back as 25 years ago. Even an Air Force Base PX (supermarket). It was HempRella cheese alternative. How does Cannabis get normalized? Like that. We even placed ads in national magazines for Hickory Smoked HempRella: “When we introduced hemp cheese they said we must be smoking something. We are now.” Don’t be afraid to leverage the stigma; remember that back then hemp was way more stigmatized than marijuana is today. The Aikido of marketing, use their energy against them.
How could we do it? If you look at those making progress back then, we all were successful professionals in our respective segments already, pivoting to the genus Cannabis from other materials, in my case soybean. By 1994 when I went from using soya to hempseed, the international sales and supply network I built for previous non-hemp products was already 8 years old. After tofu, almond, and rice cheese alternatives, hemp was just another line extension for us.
My HempNut, Inc. had a “zero THC” policy, represented by a red slash over the letters THC. Having a visible “zero THC” policy immediately relieved every consumer’s first question: “will this get me high?” And today, with the economic importance of marijuana edibles, the issue is even bigger. (The Proximity Effect image shows why the consumer’s perception of safety is more crucial for hemp foods than hemp clothes.) The policy was so effective, DEA even mentioned it as to why they decided to legalize hemp products back in 2001. Do the Right Thing even though your competitors will hate you for it.
Was I really anti-THC? Oh hell no, my smoky sweet Suite Salons at Expos East and West for years proved that. But I knew I had to calm fearful consumers, and fast. I had only a couple of seconds to make the case for a Cannabis food or lose them forever. It had to appear professional, and not made in some hippie’s kitchen. It had to be regulatory compliant, or the state FDA would be all over me. It featured a Satisfaction Guarantee, a toll-free 800 number, an email and web address (in 1993!) an invite to write us, an offer of recipes, an FDA Nutrition Facts, and a bar code. It was decidedly professional.
What does a “zero THC” policy even mean? Since all hemp products were imported back then, the THC testing protocol of U.S. Customs controlled. Their cut-off was 1 ppm, thus “zero THC = 1 ppm.” Even “non-alcoholic” beer has some alcohol, 0.5% (5,000 ppm) maximum, and “fat-free” foods can legally contain 0.5 g of fat. DEA tried to legalize 98% of all hemp products outright, no max THC, so the fiber group HIA sued to stop it. That killed the hemp food market for years, almost taking Canadian hemp down with it. Be prepared for your competitors to weaponize your good work against you, especially if you are light-years ahead.
We had a “First One’s Free” Retail promotion to get shelf space, a free fill of 1 case. Later, we hid a hemp leaf on the can to do a “Find The Leaf” promotion. Y2K was an artificial fear propagated by the media, planes would fall out of the sky and computers would die at midnight on 12/31/1999. Nothing happened, but it was ripe for a joke on a food label. Authentic Marketing should be fun.
Figure out what type of person is your target market, how and what they think and why, and point your branding efforts towards them. Your packaging, sales sheets, even product names could be very different between various target markets. Don’t try to be all things to all people.
I only studied Marketing for five years at the University because throwing away spoiled unsold tofu got old, fast. Find your “pain points” and resolve to fix them.
I don’t blame my fellow marketers, the ones who have sketchy ethics; they have to pay the rent too. But y’all need to be way more discerning; at least make them work hard to sell their fibs. Today, I’m more of an anti-Marketer, revealing the marketing magician’s secrets to his audience. You can imagine how much they like that.
Your competitors include the obvious, as well as non-direct ones. If you have a hemp bar, your competition isn’t other hemp bars but rather all bars and maybe even protein drinks. Use SWAG (Stuff We All Get) like branded T-shirts or caps. Print Point Of Purchase (POP) materials, such as shelf-talkers (little signs that go on the shelf just below the product, table-tents if a restaurant, signs for the store, and the like. Even a license plate for your Harley. Here are the Rella gloves we had made out of hemp fiber for those handling cold products, our brand subconsciously reinforced hundreds of times a day as they stock cold products on the shelf.
The best marketing works like magic, especially subliminally. For decades, the banners in the Round Table Pizza® logo have said “FUN PIZZA,” thereby working on the subconscious mind of millions.
For marketers, focus groups are critical. Years before I learned that fundamental in University, I did the poor man’s version of it: demos. Setting up a table in a store and sampling the product direct to consumers can’t be beat, especially if they think you’re just some random employee and not the owner. Listen more than you pitch.
Doing demos is important for the actual Marketer, the person developing the marketing plan. While organized focus groups are the professional way to do it today, for a boot-strapped cash-starved entrepreneurial startup in the ‘80s, demos were very useful for us. Granted, it did take applying some psychology to interpret it (consumer behavior is more a sub-set of psychology than marketing so it helps that my first major was Psych). For instance, sometimes “that’s good” is actually bad, like when you are properly aiming for “that’s amazing!” “That’s good” from friends and family has sunk more food companies than we know. Or people will give you feedback on things you never considered, that’s always super helpful. For instance, that’s how I learned that the pronunciation of “TofuRella” was phonetically similar to a colloquial, vulgar insult in French.
Of course, the most useful feedback you can get is that “the product really sucks,” that it’s just bad in some way. Nothing is more demoralizing than proudly introducing a new product that people just hate on first taste and it dies a quick death, just because you loved what no one else did. Always be willing to entertain the notion that you might, in fact, be wrong.
Conversely, when you have a winner, it becomes apparent fast. The “that’s amazing!” and “OMG where can I buy this right now!?” and “take my money!” types of comments will be transparently authentic. My tofu Cottage Salad, with its flavor combo of dill, dried onion, salt, and lemon juice, was one of those and had a cult-like following in the 1980s with Diet Center franchises and clients. We made as much as 7,000 pounds of it a week, for years. It was many people’s first positive taste of tofu.
But you have to create the conditions for success; for TofuRella, we always sampled it melted in a crockpot with a cracker or chip with which we co-demo. It wasn’t as good cold so we served it warm, for maximum impact. At trade shows, we would have as many as six crockpots running with different flavors. If someone did a demo far away, we sent them one (they were only $10 each, and we slapped a Rella sticker on it). Demos doubled as marketing tools, so we always gave them a recipe brochure and coupons.
Getting people to try tofu or anything else against their will, 99% of the time it’ll result in a scrunched nose and grimace; that’s their pre-conceived prejudice speaking, and you’ll never convert them as they’ve already decided unequivocally that they don’t like something they’ve not even tried yet. Move on fast from those chauvinistic time-wasters, you’ll get nothing helpful from them; even their comments will be through that lens of ignorance thus useless.
But then there’s that 1% that adore it, so you try to find out why. That’ll yield insights too, things of which you never even thought. Usually it’s an organoleptic quality, such as flavor or mouthfeel, but sometimes it’s more meta, such as the emotions or feelings the package or product elicits, or the perceived mission of the company, or why the product fits into a niche in their life.
Although we develop a USP and pitch first then deploy it second, you’ll always have to modify it based on things you would never think of, from what consumers tell you. It will usually impact some aspect of the marketing, such as upping or lowering sales forecasts, changing the branding or pack size, or scrapping it entirely.
Working demos also allowed me to develop a more conversational style of marketing copy for consumers than for the trade, practicing it face-to-face first. Something like 54% of Americans read at a 6th-grade level, so I aim closer to that than I do for technical or policy writing. The Elevator Pitch as it were.
When doing demos, try to split it with another company. Sampling a hummus? See if you can do it with a cracker maker.
How to use brokers and distributors. Have brokers do headquarters calls with you, at first. Distributor and chain HQs, both. They should know the Buyer already so use it to train the broker in how to present your product most effectively, and how to answer questions that come up. After a while, they can do the headquarters calls without you. Also, take this opportunity to learn from your Broker how they work.
Distributors and chains typically want an intro deal for at least a month plus quarterly deals for a month, demos in stores, a free case for their inside salespeople and a case for each store, plus buying into their ad program. Distributors add 10-40% onto the price they pay you for the product.
Brokers will also handle the calls at the store level and hire the merchandisers who make sure all is copacetic with your product on the shelf; it’s a battleground out there. Brokers like having “hip pocket deals” that you give them, like 10% MCB (manufacturer charge-back, via the distributor) and a say $5-15/case “Spiff,” basically paying them to promote you and boost sales. And that was back when they only had around 24 non-competing companies; today, they have over a hundred, even some competing lines. You’ll need to be creative to stand out with them, to be one of the handful of lines they promote that day to the stores and buyers they visit. Brokers typically get 5% of net sales through the customers to whom they represent you. I notice the successful ones now put the Broker on the Board, do whatever you must.
Stores like love free product because they make 100% margin on it. Like “slotting fees,” it’s all thinly disguised bribes and is how the retail food chain has long worked. Stores also like ad allowances, and sampling and demos, especially if you hire their staff to do it. (There’s an Art to training a demo person on your product in as few seconds as possible; figure it out as it is critical for demo success. Give them 3-5 bullet points and answers to the top 3 questions, at least.) Stores add 20-50% to the price they pay for the product, sometimes even more. The price you sell a food to the distributor will be roughly double by the time the consumer gets it.
Merchandising. There are three ways to display (“merchandise”) products in a store: integrated, separate, and novel. Integrated puts the hemp bread next to all the other breads. Separate puts the bread in a stand-alone hemp section. Novel includes such things as installing your own display rack or refrigerated case in the store. Which is best for you depends on many factors.
In the early 1990s, supermarket chains in the U.S. and Canada didn’t know how to market and merchandise the emerging vegetarian and vegan foods. They turned to us, the vendors, for help figuring it out and our solution became the industry standard. That was typically tofu, soymilk, tempeh, foods such as TofuRella cheese alternative and the similar foods from Galaxy Cheese®, and vegan meat alternatives from Yves’ Veggie Cuisine® (hotdogs and more) and Lightlife® (“Fakin’ Bacon®”), all in the Produce department.
They had to be refrigerated so that limited placement within the store, but vegetarian shoppers hated walking through the “dead animal carcass department” to buy analogs. That left Deli, Dairy, and Produce. Deli sometimes merchandised them, in a separate case to low sales. The Dairy department is more tightly controlled than drugs, and the vendors are as ruthless as the Mob.
The only department left was Produce, which the store had far more control over anyway, and had lower profit margin expectations. With Produce we had flexibility in logistics and could deliver direct to each store, through their warehouse, or via a distributor. Typically they dedicated a stand-alone refrigerated case to it, so we could merchandise it better, like this Health Eating Center header placed above the display case.
What I learned from that experience I later applied to merchandising hemp foods and shared it with the retailers and the “Hemp Evangelists” selling our foods using a custom display rack, see image.
Using colors, fonts, text copy, packaging, collateral materials and ads/PR, position the product for what people think (psychographics), not who they are (demographics). An example: a military style of packaging graphics (camo, block letters) targets not the soldier or veteran, but rather the wannabe soldier. The veteran is fine with being normal, buying normal things targeted to normal people. Early Adopters strive to be the first, Conservatives and Traditionalists the last. The Caring Mother was often the target for our natural foods marketing, even if it was a Father… because of psychographics, not demographics. The archetype best characterizing that segment was Caring Mother, so it becomes the target for your branding. Others resonating with the message will also pick it up, regardless of gender or parenthood status.
People love gifts, free stuff. Use it as a crucial component of your intro strategy, with trade, media, and influencers. If you have a truly great food, get it into as many mouths as possible as quickly as possible. We gave free product to every festival, fair, farmers market, benefit concert, or celebrity that asked. We used to get orders for a full case of products via fax with a shipping address of a venue in this city or that; we kept Willie Nelson in HempNut foods for a year. We fed the campaign for California Senator of Medea Benjamin with cases of HempNut chocolate chip cookies. It’s also a good way to go viral, give away free stuff; 1,000 lip balms at Burning Man and we still got email requests years later.
Today, there are new tools, opportunities, and methods to market effectively emerging often… find them. Chaos, crisis, or difficulty = opportunity. When the shit hits the fan, keep calm and look for the opportunity unavailable otherwise. A crisis allows you to accomplish things that are otherwise impossible.
Perception is reality. Whatever the customer perceives is the reality, but you have a great deal of control over that via your Branding.
In 2023 FDA proposed a new “healthy” claim on the labels of foods to socially engineer consumers to eat “better.” It is also considering an official “FDA Healthy” logo to be used on labels, a first for the agency. This is highly-relevant to hemp food companies, as the guidelines call for reduced sugar, sodium, and saturated fat. Hempseed is already low in all three, thus will be a good replacement in prepared foods as well as an ingredient to dilute sugar, salt, and sat fat levels to comply with the guidelines.
The primary hempseed products whole and shelled hempseed qualify, as does hemp protein powder but only as long as they don’t include sugar. The secondary product development constraints are savory but not salty, and use of artificial sweeteners. I can see baked goods, meat alternatives, and yogurt with say stevia, but not frozen desserts as much.
Look for ways of leveraging current events. In 2014 during the “ALS Ice Bucket Challenge,” I created and filmed many doing the “Hemp Bucket Challenge“ in a hemp field in Boulder. Instead of ice, they dumped a bucket of hemp fan leaves on their head. “School Marm“ Caren Kershner‘s version went viral after giving a short speech on hemp: 50,000 Shares and 500,000 Likes (especially in Poland, Brazil, and Indonesia). Look for emerging angles to promote your products like that, create a Hempseed Challenge or whatever for TikTok. It was non-commercial but it didn’t have to be, the bucket could just have your logo on it for subtle branding.
If you have an existing company, consider this new product cycle strategy, what I call “The Wave of Intros.” As your current business matures and throws off cash, use it to fund and develop your Next Big Thing. It could be a product, a product line, a brand, or a completely new type of business in a different industry. The key is to develop then leverage your core competencies, technologies, and network you’ve developed. Keep riding the waves of new introductions with each succeeding one. One wave could last anywhere from a few months to a few decades. My example is that I used cash from Rella Good Cheese Co. to fund HempNut, Inc., $2.5 million over 8 years. Today, you could easily do that with new websites and products with new positioning, dozens even at the same time to test what works and then run with that.
That ties into the Gartner Hype Cycle, relevant to new products, services, or ideas. As you get a steep adoption curve in the form of awareness or sales, the hype creates expectations that fall short of the perceived performance so it goes into the “trough of disillusionment.” That’s when all the dilettantes and arbitrageurs masquerading as Brokers move on to the next hype; maybe that’s A.I. now? What is left are the serious ones, and they take it to long-term acceptance or integration into the market. We watched the plant-based foods explosion go through this lately; big adoption followed by big disappointment. The interesting variable is time. Bitcoin and Altmeats had their cycles compressed; maybe it’s happening faster now than before. You might want to wait to introduce a killer feature until the Trough begins, to bump you back up to the Adoption stage.
Did all my products succeed? Oh heck no. Zero-FatRella was part of the fat-free craze sweeping the country in the early 1990s. As it turns out, fat-free foods were based on a highly-flawed nutritional theory. Anyway, what we found is that people will eat a low-fat meal just so they can splurge their fat allowance on rich Häagen-Dazs ice cream. Desserts and cheese were where consumers were not willing to compromise to go fat-free.
One way to control the industry conversation is by having private, invite-only events for key players, especially journalists. The owners of a big natural food chain and your favorite soap company do that, to great PR success.
In 1995, the internet and websites were new and I was into it, so I made our entire booth background appear to be a web page. Netscape, cursor, scroll bars, and all. Authentic Marketing is your friend. Also here, my staff and I are giving Michael Funk (owner of our best distributor MPW) and a couple of Brokers a rather psychedelic-looking award. Crockpots filled with HempRella in the foreground. Mr. Funk is a hemp hero, a strong early supporter (not all were).
What drives everything I’ve done over the last 44 years professionally? I’m a Marketer. Period. I market ideas for Movement progress now, but before it was other things like vegan and hemp foods.
My degree in Marketing is a BA, not a BS. Art, not Science. I consider Marketing more a branch of Psychology than a stand-alone subject, as it takes more psych than anything to convince people to give you some of their finite resources for your product or service.
Frankly, between neuroscience and focus groups, you don’t stand a chance. Free Will is a myth, yet the basis for religion and our entire criminal justice system. Savvy Marketers own your mind. And with now AI, that control can be personalized and automated. You don’t stand a chance. In the age of AI, integrity matters even more.
My first major even before music was Psych. Years later, after being in the tofu business for a few years, I was fascinated by non-intuitive consumer behavior; that’s what drove me back to Sonoma State University full-time at night at age 28.
Because of my marketing academics and years of actually doing it, I think differently about it than other Hempsters. And because of my years in the marijuana and hemp side and activism, I think differently than other Marketers. As a result today I’m burdened with the ability to see the Machiavellian marketer’s handiwork everywhere, but unable to do a damn thing about it. Except write this.
Consider using ChatGPT to write the first drafts of your marketing plan. Apparently, it can do that.
If I was younger I would start the Seedy! Incubator, where a handful of hemp food companies could develop their business model and receive assistance and mentoring from many of us in the field. Technical help, branding fundamentals, co-op Buyer presentations and trade show exhibits, joint consumer sampling… there are many benefits to a narrow segment specializing in food, both operational and marketing.
June is Hemp History Month. Do promotions around that.
Click here for trade promotion tools from the Hemp Food Association, and “Tricks of the Trade“ also from the HFA.
The above was excerpted from “Seedy!” by Richard Rose, a free ebook released in 2024. “Seedy!” or How To Start A Hemp Food Business reveals how to do well by doing good with hemp foods. Seedy! is 177 pages, 52,000 words, 200 images, and thousands of links. Cost: free. Value: priceless. Never before has an industry insider pulled back the curtain on the successful strategies used to create hemp’s biggest industry segment. Part how-to, part hemp history, part self-help guide.
Click here to download a free copy.