Branding is the process of creating an image that solidifies a company’s products or services in the minds of consumers. A company’s brand sets it apart. And a big part of successful branding is choosing a name. Take the cannabis industry. Few industries need to be as careful about names as the cannabis industry.
Cookies is one of the most well-known brands in cannabis. Beehive Farmacy, a marijuana dispensary with locations in Salt Lake City and Brigham City, UT sells the brand. They say that Cookies markets itself as a lifestyle brand for people who insist on high-quality and innovative products.
What does the name mean to you?
If you have never heard of the Cookies brand of marijuana products, stop and think about their branding right now. When you first read the name, what did you think of? You likely thought of a delicious treat you enjoy with a cold glass of milk. That would be normal. Prior to state-legal cannabis, this is what cookies were.
By choosing that particular word, the company behind it has created a positive feeling to go along with its brand. When people think about cookies in general, they think good things. The Cookies cannabis brand relies on cannabis consumers associating similarly good feelings with their products.
As a side note, Cookies also markets under four additional brands: C CBD, Lemonade, PowerZZZup, and Grandiflora Genetics. Read each of those brand names again and take 10 or 20 seconds to consider the images they conjure up. Guess what they all have in common? None of them actually mentioned marijuana, THC, etc.
What are they trying to hide?
Among the vast ocean that makes up the world’s many cannabis brands, very few companies include any direct correlation to marijuana in their names. So, what are they trying to hide? It is not a matter of hiding something. It’s a matter of getting around a historically bad reputation.
Despite the cannabis plant being used for both industrial and medical practices for millennia, it got a bad rap during the early 20th century thanks to a small number of crimes linked to marijuana users. Fear took over and a feeding frenzy of anti-marijuana regulation ensued. Marijuana was eventually banned in the United States in the 1970s.
Today, cannabis brands are still having to deal with the past. They recognize that the word ‘marijuana’ still has negative connotations in the culture. So they avoid it like the plague. Instead, they search for names capable of encouraging positive reactions no matter who hears or reads them.
Is the practice limited to brands?
Interestingly enough, playing the word game with marijuana and cannabis isn’t limited just to brands. It seems that everyone involved in the industry in any way, shape, or form wants to avoid the word ‘marijuana’.
In Utah, lawmakers have not approved medical marijuana. They have approved medical cannabis instead. Likewise, patients do not visit marijuana dispensaries to get their medicines. They visit state licensed medical cannabis pharmacies, like the previously mentioned Beehive Farmacy.
Utah regulators have loosened up quite a bit in recent years. But when the state’s medical cannabis program was first launched, they were very uptight about language. Cultivators, processors, and retail operators had to be incredibly careful about the words they used because lawmakers did not want the Beehive State associated with marijuana in any way.
Regardless, brand names are critically important in the cannabis industry. They are important in every industry, but cannabis is different due to the negative connotations associated with it. Cookies is the perfect example of how cannabis brands get around those negative connotations.
