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Spreading the word about the reopening of a business that had been closed since it was hit by a fire last spring is easy.
Spreading the word about a product that had been banned for most of the past century amid a maelstrom of fact and fable is harder.
“Traditional marketing strategies aren’t direct apples-to-apples comparisons,” said Ricardo Baca, who had worked at The Denver Post for 13 years as a general-assignment reporter, music critic and entertainment editor before covering the cannabis beat and then founding the marketing firm Grasslands Ltd. in 2017.
“It starts out with the fact that we’re coming out of 80 years of prohibition that was devastating to the truth,” Baca said. “It was a war of misinformation, one of the most successful ever staged, instilling fear in a nontoxic plant and feeding off the power of the unknown. We’re still digging out of that.”
Cannabis carries its own sets of “risks and harms,” Baca acknowledged, “but they’ve been grotesquely exaggerated.”
Trey Fisher, director of retail operations and marketing for The Cannabist Co., hasn’t encountered such formidable obstacles in getting the word out about the reopening of the Medicine Man dispensary in Longmont, but admits that the underlying issues and perceptions surrounding the 13-year-old legalization of cannabis in Colorado still shadow his marketing efforts.
The statement he sent to media outlets rings of typical public-relations fodder:
“Reopening our Medicine Man location in Longmont is a proud moment for all of us here at The Cannabist Co. The dedication and perseverance of our team brought this store back to life. We’re thrilled to reintroduce ourselves to the community, offering our approachable customer service, our premium products and a refreshed space where people can feel welcomed and valued.”
Fisher’s 11-year-old New York-based company operates brick-and-mortar dispensaries in 10 states including Medicine Man, which it acquired in 2021, as well as Green Solution in Fort Collins and 21 other stores across Colorado. Medicine Man, he said, is “an important piece of our Colorado portfolio,” and its closure stretched nearly to year’s end.
The Medicine Man Dispensary, 500 E. Rogers Road in Longmont, is open again after closing because of an electrical fire in April. Courtesy The Cannabist Co.
“Last April 30, we walked into the store and saw smoke coming from the vault. It burned everything to a crisp,” Fisher said. “Smoke and debris covered the entire dispensary. So we had to make sure the building was safe and clean for our customers.”
The next step, he said, was marketing “to reintroduce ourselves to the Longmont community” because eight months “is a really long time. But I was a little surprised. We did a soft opening Dec. 24 and saw a lot of old faces we were used to seeing.”
The final step in the publicity push was a grand reopening Friday and Saturday complete with food trucks and vendors.
But where to tell that story?
Although states such as Colorado legalized retail sales of medical and recreational cannabis, the federal government still considers it a Schedule I controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, marijuana “has a high potential for abuse, no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States, and a lack of accepted safety for use under medical supervision.” Other Schedule I substances include heroin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (ecstasy), methaqualone and peyote.
For now, the Schedule I status has ripples far beyond stores not being able to open bank accounts because their accounts can’t be insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
“There’s still a lot of restrictions, even on social media,” Fisher said. “We’re very limited in what we can show. We’ve had our accounts shut down. We can’t buy Facebook or Instagram ads. I don’t see a lot of consistency in some of the regulations and who’s getting shut down and who’s not.
“It’s hard to buy media you can see a return of investment on,” he said. “You don’t see cannabis commercials on TV. We’ve got stadiums named for alcohol, like Coors Field, but that would never go for a cannabis company. I think there was one that put in a competitive bid, but I don’t think it was considered.”
Nearly the only remaining avenues, Fisher said, are “our in-house database and word of mouth. We just have to look for ways to be creative and set us apart while following the marketing rules.”
Last year, the DEA responded to President Joe Biden’s directive to reschedule cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III. If finalized, the change would reclassify marijuana as a drug with moderate to low potential for dependence. The fate of the proposal in the forthcoming Trump administration is uncertain.
The interior of the 5,200-square-foot Medicine Man dispensary in Longmont. Courtesy The Cannabist Co.
“That would be the most significant drug policy decision in our lifetime,” Baca said. “But for now, they cannot buy ads on Google, Meta or X. They refuse to take money from these state-legal businesses because they’re on the wrong side federally. If you’re a grower, a retailer, or you make hemp beverages, good luck finding the right channels to do that digitally.
“That does create an outsized importance for public relations,” he said, tasking firms such as Grasslands with finding “clever ways of marketing without access to primary marketing tools every other business has access to.
”This is where we step in and say, ‘OK, here are different ways to position your brand.”
Baca cited three available media channels to get the word out:
Paid media: “That’s advertising and sponsorships.”
Earned media: “That’s where you’re covered in stories, interviews and podcasts.
Owned media: “That’s our own websites, our social channels, places where we own what we say on there.”
Grasslands’ focus, he said, is “mostly earned and owned media.”
Added Marylyn Simpson, public relations director for California-based Kip Morrison & Associates, “Everything we do is earned media — journalistic-style PR, story pitches we send to the press, work to get our clients mentioned in news stories.”
Besides, Baca noted, “we’re servicing an industry that has little budget left over for marketing. Every plant-touching business in the United States is paying an effective tax rate double what any other business is paying right now. Most businesses pay an effective tax rate of 30%, but cannabis growers, processors and retailers pay an effective tax rate of 60% because of IRS Tax Code 280E. It’s a dated, racketeering, Al Capone-era tax code that punishes businesses that deal in illegal substances.
“So cannabis businesses have less money to pay themselves, market themselves, or even conduct core business practices just because what they’re selling remains federally illegal,” he said. “But hopefully 280E will go away as soon as cannabis is Schedule III.”
An issue with earned media, Simpson said, is the changing face of journalism itself.
“Publications are folding. Budgets are being cut,” she said. “And the way people are consuming journalism is changing so much. A lot of cannabis publications have come and gone, and their journalists move on to something else. That has become a challenge that trickles all the way down into how I form my own PR strategy for work.
“We’re actually having a meeting about this next week,” she said. “What are our goals for our clients? What messaging are we trying to get through? What outlets? What writers? We’ve got to be mindful and strategic about how we’re going to market cannabis. We can’t be like throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.”
When her agency started in 1977, Simpson said, “it obviously was not a cannabis firm. We were mostly into CPG (consumer-packaged goods), lifestyle products.”
In 2013 or 2014, she said, company founder Kip Morrison “signed her first cannabis client and had really great success with it. Kip saw that cannabis was starting to go legal and would be the next sector of CPG, just like anything else, beauty products or clothing, anything a human consumes.
“So slowly but surely, our roster began to switch from beauty and fashion to cannabis products,” she said, “until now we’re primarily a cannabis agency, even moving into the mushroom and psychedelic spaces.”
At Grasslands, however, Baca has hedged his bets by diversifying into a more mainstream clientele, but one that still leans into the organic and natural space.
“We made this expansion formal early last year,” he said.
His client list now includes the Boulder County Farmers Markets, which “abide by the USDA definition of what a farmer’s market is. Candles and vintage clothes aren’t a farmer’s market. They focus on the producers; that’s what sets them apart. And we are their PR agency of record.”
His agency has also publicized the Illegal Pete’s fast-casual restaurant chain’s initiative for plant-based protein, as well as the nonprofit Naturally Colorado, which rebranded from Naturally Boulder and “is working statewide with businesses wanting to get into that CPG space.”
Grasslands also is the marketing partner of two Loveland-area businesses: Wild Zora Foods, which he said “makes a healthy quality ingredients for CPG products and everything from instant breakfasts to healthy meals that backpackers and campers love,” and Flatiron Food Factory, a business-to-business company with what Baca said is a “massive facility north of Loveland that does contract manufacturing across the CPG sector and really focuses a lot on dehydrated products like pouched soups and freeze-dried meals sold at REI and other outdoor retailers.
“Those more mainstream Colorado businesses are a lot of fun for us,” Baca said.
Baca and Simpson both have journalism backgrounds and contend that their marketing principles are based on telling the truth.
“My 24 years at daily newspapers set me up to do this because learning the ethics of journalism that govern your work every day instilled values that go outside the newsroom,” Baca said. “When you can do so with awareness, ethics, an attention to detail and a desire to always communicate very clearly, it’s a profound combination.”
Simpson, a University of Missouri School of Journalism graduate, moved from St. Louis to Los Angeles in 2014 and started working at Kip Morrison & Associates in Beverly Hills six weeks later.
“I got asked, ‘Do you want to take on a cannabis account?’ And I thought, ‘It sounds so novel. I’ll have a job nobody else has. I was 26, 27, hungry, wanted to make a name for myself and get out there, and I thought, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? Would the DEA show up at my door?
“But people thought I was crazy,” she said. They’d say, ‘We don’t write about this’ and ‘It’s career suicide’ and ‘You’re pigeonholing yourself.’ It’s like the Wild West in its own way.
“I’m glad I just stuck to my guns,” she said. “We just persisted and attitudes have changed. It’s less stigmatized.”
Like Grasslands, Simpson’s agency also focuses on integrity, adopting the motto, “We don’t blow smoke.”
For the stigmas that still exist, Baca said in a TEDx talk in Boulder, it’s just a matter of “hitting control-alt-delete inside our own minds and intellects. What we’ve been told about weed is wrong, and let me tell you how wrong it is.
“Eighty years of prohibition is a lot to overcome,” he said. “The population is a lot smarter and savvier now, but we still have a long way to go.”
Grasslands Ltd. founder Ricardo Baco delivers a TEDx talk on cannabis in Boulder. Courtesy Grasslands Ltd.”}]] Spreading the word about the reopening of a business that had been closed since it was hit by a fire last spring is easy. Spreading the word about cannabis, a product that had been banned for most of the past century amid a maelstrom of fact and fable, is harder. Read More
