Understanding the customer is the professed bedrock of every company with a consumer product to sell, but what do you do when the industry is brand spanking new, many of its consumers are also new, and the ones that are not now need to adapt to the often-confusing world of CPG? The use of data is frequently the answer, and in the cannabis industry there are a number of market research companies that already have years under their belts trying to provide actionable data for every sector of the supply chain, with most including consumer insights as one of their products. At Chicago-based Brightfield Group, however, the singular focus of their work from its founding in 2015 has been the cannabis consumer, a type of consumer that, as Brightfield co-founder and Managing Director Bethany Gomez explained to CBE during a recent interview, is tantalizingly unique in the CPG universe, with a “passion” and “zeal” rarely if ever seen for consumer packaged products.

“I had worked previously with Patrick Hayden, my co-founder and CEO,” said Gomez of the company’s origin story. “Our backgrounds were in mainstream CPG market research, and Patrick had teamed up with a family office down in Tampa that had the opportunity to make an investment in the cannabis space. Back in 2014, early ‘15, they were looking around saying, ‘There’s not really any data to make a good decision, but given all the expected growth in the space, this really seems like a significant opportunity.’ My background was specifically in emerging market CPG. I used to manage operations, including a team of analysts in Latin America, looking at market sizing, and understanding consumer goods markets, like packaged foods, drinks, alcohol, tobacco, you name it. I came with a strong background in research methodologies and creatively thinking about methodologies that are going to work in imperfect markets, crazy, fast-moving markets.”

That sounded like a running definition of the cannabis market. “We teamed up and took that approach looking at the cannabis space, and when we first launched in 2015, we made it our goal to start small and really listen to the market and what it was looking for,” she added. “And Patrick told me when we were first starting that the company that we’re going to come out with is going to look completely different five years down the line than what we start with, but we really wanted to explore this cannabis space and understand where the needs and real gaps were in this market that was just starting to evolve. And as we started, we initially launched in market sizing and we pretty quickly realized that in this market that was so nascent from a legal perspective but still had such a strong built-in consumer base, that the future of the industry was driven by the consumer.”

‘It Was Always the Consumer’

“It was always going to come down to the consumer,” said Gomez of Brightfield’s focus. “What they were looking for, their attitudes, their behaviors, their psychographics, their demographic, their mentalities, and how well companies were going to be able to convert these consumers from the illicit market to the legal market, or to convert consumers that previously weren’t using cannabis to try cannabis for the first time or to transition from alcohol or pharmaceuticals. This industry was going to be all about the consumer, so from a very early stage we started focusing in great depth on the consumer.

“We also knew from looking at the market that it was not your standard CPG market out of the gate, especially in the very early days, and still not today,” she added. “One day, it likely will be but we’re not there yet, and so, to look at this kind of a market, we needed to be able to take the strongest foundations of consumer research, and we also needed to be creative to be able to adapt with these fast-moving, nuanced, ever-emerging markets, to understand future consumers, and to understand consumers of products that were just starting to be developed.

“We brought on our VP of Product, Jenn Kregor, who had come out of a think tank at UPenn and was working on integrating traditional data sources like surveys in with social listening directly, looking at the power of the data that you were able to provide and the depth that you were able to provide for companies even with small budgets or in markets that move very quickly. We were able to leverage some methodologies that were inspired by work that had been done in academia to integrate some of these data sources together and be able to provide an integrative, holistic view of consumers, and to start to harness the power of social listening.”

What is social listening? “When I look at the world of social media, it is what many refer to as the world’s largest focus group,” explained Gomez. “There are so many people that are out there talking, commenting, pouring out their hopes, their dreams, their frustrations, their challenges, talking about products, talking about their condition, seeking advice, seeking perspective. There are millions and millions of conversations happening every day on social media, and that social media data can be harnessed and effectively integrated in a number of different ways. There is no shortage of data; the greatest challenge is being able to harness data effectively enough to be able to make decisions off of it.

“At Brightfield,” she continued, “we use social listening in two ways. One is what we call our social panel data, where we actually integrate our surveys directly with social media. What that means is, our survey respondents get the ability to opt-in and share their social handles on platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and we are able to collect the posts that they’re making in their own words that we can run through natural language processing and pull out some really rich personality profiles. We can collect the handles that they’re following and put together very rich lifestyle profiles, see who their influences are, what media sources they’re turning to, what brands they love. Things like that can be really effective as a very cost-effective way to get a deep understanding of your consumer and be able to make that actionable, take that strategy level data and make that actionable for things like digital marketing. So, it’s a very strong one-stop-shop for marketers at large and small companies alike to be able to have this insight into who their consumer is.”

Is that a tool that is applicable to any industry? “It absolutely is,” replied Gomez. “As we talk about our evolution as a company, our roots were in cannabis and then we expanded and have great foundations in the CBD space as well as the needs of our client, and then evolved into the Canadian cannabis space, last year, we had many clients from adjacent industries that were looking into CBD and cannabis that had said to us things like, ‘Well, I love the way that you do research; we’re also trying to understand the adaptogens market and the functional beverages market; come talk to us when you can do the same type of research in other emerging market categories.’

“These are where a lot of the same challenges come into play,” continued Gomez. “So, in 2021, we released our Evergi platform, which explores all of these adjacencies to the cannabis and CBD space, and enables that exploration for consumers or our clients,who are marketers or folks in innovation, to understand these consumers of emerging trends and what makes them tick and how they’re thinking about their consumption, and how this fits into their lifestyles overall. For our cannabis clients, it is also extremely valuable to understand how to attract new customers as well as how their brand fits into the adjacent worlds that they compete in, whether it’s inhalable products, nonalcoholic beers and spirits, or other products. So, the same methodologies apply, and to the extent that we’ve really pioneered in cannabis, it’s because we’ve had to; it’s such a nuanced industry, such a crazy emerging market space, that we have had to be really creative about our methodologies, but those same lessons learned here can apply to many other industries as well.”

I had asked because I thought it might have been the other direction, that they had introduced new techniques from the mainstream into cannabis, but it sounds like it also is the other way around. “It really is the other way around,” said Gomez, “but I will say that we take our data quality very seriously at Brightfield. It’s very important to us that the data quality we’re applying in cannabis meets all of the same standards from the outside CPG world. It’s just about some of our abilities with such a rapidly changing market, but our Senior Director of Insights, Meg Bluth, came over from working insights at Coca Cola, so we have CPG DNA in there as well, and we make sure for our clients that need that structure, that same level of depth that they’re used to, that they can approach things similarly and have confidence in the data. But we also had to be creative and pioneer new techniques to harness the data in cannabis using a variety of methodologies, from data science, engineering, insights, research academia, really from all across the board. You can put these methodologies together to think forward about how to collect data, how to capture these insights, and how to communicate those in cannabis.”

A Very Different Sort of CPG Consumer

What then is the difference between a normal CPG industry and the cannabis industry? This is now considered a CPG industry, but I’ve always pushed back a little because I thought the cannabis consumer and their relationship to the product was nuanced, unique, and maybe a little more complex than with most packaged goods.

“You’re really hitting the nail on the head here,” responded Gomez. “Yes, this is quote, unquote a consumer-packaged goods industry, it’s a consumer driven industry, and these are packaged goods that are developed by brands that are bringing these products to market through a supply chain that now looks very similar to other CPG markets. But there are a lot of nuances here. One thing that we found really early on in our social listening explorations was what we all call the culture, just the absolute zeal and passion that so many cannabis consumers have towards the plant that is really unparalleled when you look at a lot of CPG industries that many companies like to compare us to. But there are very few people that are as passionate about breakfast cereal as cannabis consumers are about their cannabis, and we found with many of these consumers, that 95 percent of the handles our heavy users were following were cannabis-related. If it was a musician, it was a cannabis-focused musician; if it was exercise, they were logged onto cannabis and exercise. It was cannabis and so many different things, and whether they’re illicit market or legal market, so many of these consumers are so passionate about cannabis that it really has permeated their lifestyle in a way that’s not really paralleled in CPG.

“And this also parallels with frequency of use,” she continued. “We’re tracking this, and we find that 64 percent of cannabis consumers are using it at least once a day. We look at the occasions of consumption for heavy users, and they’re using throughout the day. Many consumers are using from the time they wake up, when they’re at work; they use before they exercise, they use during exercising. Some people may use cannabis on social occasions, and there are other segments of consumers where cannabis is their dirty little secret; they’re only going to do it by themselves, at home, maybe at the end of the night. There are other segments that only use socially and on an occasional basis, but the real culture and passion and zeal around the cannabis space, especially amongst those heavy users, of which there’s a very large number, is really unparalleled in the mainstream CPG space. The level of passion and zeal is closer to iPhone users than other kinds of CPG like breakfast cereals, chocolate bars, or things like that, and being able to understand these consumers – their perspectives, their thoughts, their motivations, their behaviors and psychographics – really helps to provide this conductive understanding.”

The uses it can be put to are tangible and significant, said Gomez. “Our clients, who are really marketers and strategists in the space, understand how to connect with those consumers in a meaningful way over the longer term,” she explained. “But in the transition to a CPG market, I think we’re still in inning three or four at most. It’s evolving from only a decade ago, when legal cannabis wasn’t present in most places and was sold illicit and mostly homegrown in baggies. Today, it is not sold in local markets, but it has been taken from a baggie to the same kind of a purchase funnel as you’d see for chocolate bars or alcohol or other consumer goods. And the evolution of branding has come a long way, too. We are starting to see brands matter to consumers, and to see consumer loyalty develop. Consumers’ decision-making also has changed so much since those early days. Now, people are making decisions based off of how brands make them feel, differentiating between the products themselves, and understanding the balance between pricing and product attributes and dosage, including all sorts of different product formats. We’re seeing that evolution come into play, and it is very exciting that we’re to the point where consumers are receptive to this, because brand awareness and loyalty is essential.”

To meet that particular need, Brightfield recently launched its syndicated Brand Health tracker in the U.S. “We’ve been doing this on a customized basis in the U.S. for several years, as well as in the Canadian cannabis space for several years,” said nGomez, “and what we’re finding is that when you look at the awareness level of brands in the cannabis space, it is very different than if you’re looking at purchase funnels or awareness levels for a brand of soft drinks, for example. If you are a human and have been to a grocery store or to any kind of a store and walked the aisles, whether you have purchased soda or not, you have seen the soda brands consistently throughout your life, through mainstream advertising and a lot of different areas, but just by going to a grocery store, you’re exposed to so many brands and have such a deep kind of ingrained level of awareness of so many of these products.

“But the cannabis industry is still nascent in most states,” she continued, “so brand awareness is still very low, and consumers often don’t even know what they have purchased. So, there’s a lot of work that brands have needed to do over the last few years and still need to do to crystallize in the minds of consumers what their brand is, what it means to them, and to start to level through the ladder of emotional connectivity beyond just pricing or features but having an emotional connection with brands. We’re starting to see the beginnings of this among consumers and how they’re reacting to certain brands versus others, and it’s been really exciting for us to see.”

Courting the New Consumer at the Expense of the Old Stoner?

I asked Gomez about the significance of the retail experience to both consumers and brands, and whether things like celebrity promotions worked in the long-run. I also asked her about a LinkedIn post I had seen from Brightfield that talked about the importance of creating and maintaining a relationship with established, often longtime cannabis consumers.

“There are some key things that I want to hit on here, and I want to come back to the celebrity question,” she responded. “Looking at cannabis drinks users, I think the cannabis drinks question is a really good example of why data is so important, and not just data, but consumer data and understanding your consumers motivations and how they’re using things. So many people in this industry operate on shoestring budgets, which I completely understand, and many just try to go off of gut, develop products with themselves in mind as the consumer, and they try to extrapolate beyond there.

“We also hear time and again from the cannabis drink space that cannabis drinks have so much potential to be the bridge to new consumers, older consumers, soccer moms, women, people coming in that would never touch an inhalable with a 10-foot pole,” she added. “Converting the White Claw mom into a cannabis drinks user is kind of viewed as the future for drinks, and at the same time, we often hear people lamenting why is cannabis still such a small percentage of the overall drink space when there’s all this potential with these outside users.

“But when we look at the data for cannabis drinks, what we find is that that is not actually the cannabis drinks user, but a relatively small percentage of the cannabis drinks consumer,” she continued. “What we see when we look at the cannabis drinks consumer is a heavy consumer. These are consumers who are using cannabis consistently. 19 percent of cannabis consumers overall have purchased a drink in the last six months, and the majority of those – over 60 or 70 percent – are daily cannabis users. This is not your occasional consumer that might try one drink every once in a while. These are heavy cannabis users, and the category is still so small because these are not the only products they’re using. They’re using a lot of other product types. Just like if you’re a nonalcoholic drinks consumer, you’re not going to drink Coca Cola every day for your whole life, and we find it’s very similar with heavy cannabis consumers, and it makes perfect sense. It’s not necessarily a novel thought, but they still like to consume flower, they also use concentrates, they may use a gummy here or there, consuming different product types for different use cases. They are also using drinks but are they drinking them all the time? No, but these are the consumers that are using it.

“Now if you’re thinking about this from a business perspective,” she added, “and you’re thinking about this strictly in terms of looking at the share of the market and the value of your consumer, wouldn’t your dollars be better spent trying to get more occasions of consumption out of your existing consumer rather than spending tons of money trying to chase those consumers that are not yet users, and try to get them to come in and try your product and then have to try to drive them into becoming more loyal, and then having to really bridge that gap overall, to drive them into the purchase funnel? That’s a very expensive and a very challenging proposition. I’m sure some will be successful that way, and some brands do that, but the greater opportunity and the one that’s a lot more cost-effective for companies is targeting the built-in consumer who is already spending hundreds of dollars a month on cannabis and is consuming it multiple times a day, and is already using cannabis drinks, so why not get more consumption out of them? These are some of the things that data and understanding consumers can help show more than just what products have been sold and at what register, by really starting to understand that consumer in their behavior and where there are opportunities to engage with them further.

“To answer your question about celebrities,” concluded Gomez, “it’s an interesting proposition. We’ve watched this in the cannabis space, we watched it in the CBD space, and we often get the question from clients: ‘Does it make sense to bring in a celebrity and is that going to help drive the sales of my products and launch my brand?’ It kind of depends on what celebrities. We were talking about Brand Health, and what brand health does is it takes consumer perceptions of your brand, and segments that through the purchase funnel so we can see how many consumers are aware of you, and if that awareness translates into loyalty. If you use a celebrity, you can jack-up your awareness level very quickly, and it’s a good way to do so especially if you put PR efforts to work and you can get that awareness generated. But that’s not yet going to convert it all the way through the funnel; it can, but it definitely doesn’t automatically.

“There are many celebrity brands that do not resonate as authentic within their category,” she added. “We see high awareness levels, and everybody’s heard of this brand, but are they going to consider buying it? No, and you just blew a ton of money on awareness that is not going to drive the longevity of your brand, and it’s going to be a very expensive and potentially short-lived operation. For some brands, if that message lands, then yes, you’ll still see that awareness level is very high, you can see the consideration level also high, and you can see that drive down through to purchase loyalty and satisfaction for your consumers as well. Some brands have handled this very well and have been able to effectively be perceived as authentic to the culture of cannabis, and really resonate with consumers. And certainly, Cookies is probably the best example of this out there, and they have incredible metrics on loyalty and awareness purchase, from great funnel metrics all the way through, whereas there have been many of other celebrity brands that got really high awareness and then just fell flat or had a very significant drop-off.”

A Different Industry Than We Imagined

Brightfield also looks at the reasons why people enter the market, or not. “We look at a great deal of data to understand the new users coming in, how they’re using, why they’re using, and we look at that incidence rate over time,” said Gomez. “With our platforms and approach, we can explore those adjacencies and those outside categories, and we absolutely do look at both alcohol users and nonalcohol users, consumers that are not using cannabis, to find out what are they using, why are they using things, what is their perceptions, what are some of the barriers, as well as what are some of the opportunities. We see the consumer landscape shifting quite dramatically, especially from a generational lens. This emanates through many segments of consumers that are rethinking their relationships with alcohol and moving away from consuming alcohol on a regular basis and looking to swap it out for other products. Older generations tend to swap out for sodas or just basic products, but Gen Z goes straight for the cannabis.

“It was Gen Z consumers and younger millennial consumers particularly that came of age at a time when legal cannabis is just normal and are looking at swapping alcohol for cannabis in a more significant way,” she noted. “So, there are a lot of shifts, and I could talk all day about some of the consumer behaviors and attitudes that are helping drive some of those shifts, and we really like to help clients understand better those consumers that aren’t yet using cannabis, and there certainly are some opportunities there as consumers come into the category, but I caution clients about building brands based off of who they think the consumer will be if only they try cannabis This is still an emerging industry and there is still a lot of growth potential in it, but it doesn’t necessarily look like people thought it was going to when they first started to opine about legal cannabis, and the industry we’re going to have on our hands 10 years from now is going to look different from the industry we have today, and it’s probably going to look different from what most people expect it to look like. So, building your brand strategy or a whole product strategy around these future consumers that you are sure will come in is a risky endeavor. There are a lot of built-in consumers today, and a lot of opportunity with those consumers that will allow brands to be able to get some traction, get some success out of the gate, and to kind of wait for the day.”

A Bright Future for Brightfield Group

Our time running low, I asked Gomez to encapsulate the established and upcoming features of their platforms that current and potential clients need to know about. “Our main product is our Insights platforms, or our insights subscriptions,” she said, “which is a software-as-a-service SAAS platform where our clients can purchase access to different subscriptions based off of their needs. We have four core subscriptions in the cannabis and CBD space. We have our consumer insights subscriptions that are based on quarterly surveys run on consumers of those specific industries. We have one on the U.S. cannabis space, one on the Canadian cannabis space, one on the U.S. CBD space, and one on the general population that looks at all of the adjacencies as well as a lot of behavioral attitudinal type of data around health and wellness. All of those surveys are integrated with social media, so we have those deep psychographics and lifestyle profiles about consumers.

“We also released in the U.S. cannabis space our Brand Health platform,” she continued. “Our consumer insights platform allows clients to understand the consumer of each product category in an incredible amount of depth. Brand Health really helps our clients be able to understand how well their brand is resonating with consumers, and how to benchmark against the competition, and it is really used as a bit of a scorecard for marketers. It allows them to see how well they’re achieving their goals, as well as gives them a pathway to understand how to allocate their marketing spend. It helps them identify what problems they are solving and how to put their budgets most effectively towards that. Do they need to put that money in the top of the funnel awareness in getting their message out there, or is there a message out there but their message just isn’t landing? Do they need to make adjustments or are they just not converting very well within the dispensary from that consideration to purchase? Do they need to invest in budtender education? That’s the scorecard that Brand Health provides, as well as that ability to benchmark against the competition.

“We also have what’s called our Distribution Trends platform, which is a two-tiered approach to product innovation. We conduct digital menu audits on 90 percent of dispensaries around the country, so we can pull in essentially all the products that are on shelves in the US and in the Canadian cannabis market and look at which product attributes – strains, flavors, ingredients, dosage levels – are growing and trending, and then marry that with which brands and which product types are growing or contracting or trending over time, and then be able to align that also with social listening data. So, we’re capturing the full breadth of conversations around cannabis on social media: how much are consumers talking about different concentrates products; is live resin trending versus wax versus shatter; what strains are consumers talking about; this can be really predictive for what future strains will be successful, minor cannabinoid, brands, products, etcetera. So, that gives our clients a good 360-degree view more at the product or the brand level of how their products are performing both on the shelf but also in the minds of consumers.

“We also have our Market Insights subscription,” she continued. “Those look at your standard market sizing forecasting, a forward-looking view of the market that pulls in all of our data from our extensive consumer insights data as well as all of our social listening and distribution, as well as any publicly available data, and then our analysts get the very fun job of digging through all of that data, really pull it all together, and have that forward-looking perspective and view of what’s happening in the industry. So, those are the four key pillars of what we do, and clients will use our solutions overall for their brand strategy, for their day-to-day marketing and operations to be able to understand their marketing spend and allocation to really drive their product development roadmap and make data-driven decisions on their product development, their business planning, their expansion planning, things like that.

“We are less a data provider than an insights partner for our clients,” she added. “We have an incredible insights team here at Brightfield that eats, sleeps, and breathes cannabis and the insights in the data around this, and many clients like to be able to really go deeper for their brand in particular, so we can do custom research, custom surveys, custom qualitative work, custom dives, and we tell clients, if you don’t have an analyst and you don’t have time to be able to truly understand what’s happening in the space, you can rent ours and be able to dig and tap into our subject matter experts to help drive your perspective on the space. We have so much data in our data lake, it’s a beautiful place for cannabis data nerds. There’s so much that we can pull together and be able to triangulate, understand, and leverage for the custom needs of our clients.”

All of this growth and innovation was undertaken to meet demand. “When we launched,” said Gomez, “we were looking at market sizing, and we were still in kind of an experimental mode, doing a lot of data collection, having conversations with companies in the space. We launched some initial consumer research on more of an ad hoc basis and did a lot of custom work. And I would say in those early days the custom work was a great way for us to understand the needs of the market, and then we launched the foundations of our SAAS platform in the fall of 2018, which involves markets market insights, subscription and consumer insights subscription to both cannabis and CBD. We’ve expanded dramatically since then. In 2019, we launched our first syndicated Brand Health tracker in the U.S. cannabis space. In 2020, we launched our Distribution Trends platforms, and also our social listening platform and product dashboards within the US. We also launched our first full standalone Canadian subscription, which includes consumer insights and brand health as well as market insights in the Canadian cannabis space.

“In 2021,” she concluded, “we launched our Evergi platform, which is the general population study that we use to explore both cannabis and CBD and all of the adjacent categories in foods and supplements as well as other substances, like hemp-derived THC and psychedelics, among others. Then just this fall, we’ve launched our syndicated Brand Health tracking within the U.S. cannabis space, which explores consumer reactions to brands and dispensaries in the country. And then in early December, we will be launching our Product Brand Health subscription. This looks at the top 11 or 12 markets here in the US, looking category-by-category, state-by-state how brands are measuring up in the minds of consumers, whether it’s awareness, consideration, purchase loyalty, satisfactions, and perceptions. So, we have expanded a lot!”

I asked Gomez one final question about Brightfield’s long-term strategic goals, and what metrics they use to gauge success. “Our clients are at the core of our success,” she replied. “We want them to be successful, and so we look at our client’s satisfaction, client growth, and client renewal rates as key metrics. But we also want to be able to evolve and grow with the market. We certainly are continuing to grow our base, continuing to expand our offerings, both of which allow us to continue to be well-positioned in this volatile market. Our methodologies allow us to do that as well. We go deeper into CBD than many other cannabis companies can, and we can go into the Delta-8 space and explore that in a lot more depth. We also can easily reach into psychedelics and give a deep dive there, and so we can reach into all these adjacent categories and be able to respond to what those next questions are in the market. Staying ahead of the curve is important for us, being able to take some of these methodologies that we’ve developed and the offerings that we’ve refined in the cannabis space and extending them out into other emerging markets is extremely valuable for our company trajectory as well.”