What do Canadian cannabis consumers want? Not even they know

Everyone in the cannabis sector wants to know what adult-market consumers want from the world of cannabis products

The problem is, they may need to wait for the bulk of consumers to find that out for themselves.

The newest numbers from Brightfield Group’s January 2020 Canadian Cannabis report aren’t encouraging: a third of Canadian consumers had no idea what brands of cannabis they’d bought, while half didn’t know what dosage they preferred.

Those are impressive numbers, but consider: one week into legalization in 2018, 95% of consumers shopping at legal cannabis stores in four markets could not say which brands they had purchased.

A third of the market having little familiarity with brands on offer strikes most vendors as bad news, though a problem some retailers have attempted to circumvent by abandoning new branded names and identifying LP products by their traditional cultivar names. Early into legalization, Matt Ryan, VP marketing for retailer META Cannabis (formerly National Access Cannabis), confirmed old habits of buying by strain had carried over into the legal market.

Yet companies have little idea exactly what their customers want to buy. It’s easy enough to understand why Canopy’s new CEO David Klein told BNN Bloomberg last week,

“I want to focus the business on the consumer. It’s cool that we can now grow and sell cannabis in a legal fashion, but we haven’t built that connection with the consumer.”

Last summer, Canopy was forced to face the fact that it bet big on oil and gel-caps for the adult-use market only to find consumers didn’t want very many of them.

Read the full article at Leafly