Shopping For Cannabis With All Five Senses And Other Merchandising Strategies To Improve Customer Experience And Brand Positioning
How important is merchandising in cannabis industry? Should brands use products to tell stories to their customers, and do stores influence the way customers purchase? These and other tactics were discussed by experts at the recent Benzinga Cannabis Capital Conference during a panel called “Merchandising Strategies To Drive Cannabis Retail Growth.”
“In traditional retail, merchandising actually references inventory and assortment. In cannabis, I very rarely hear that,” moderator Krista Raymer, CEO of Vetrina, kicked off the discussion. She explained that visual merchandising is a combination of what’s in the store and how it’s displayed to the customer. The question is – why do we have it? What role does it play in the store?
Laura Jaramillo Bernal, chief operating officer of nuEra Cannabis, said when she started working in cannabis in Illinois, the experience was “incredibly generic and antiseptic.” According to her, retail merchandising is fulfilling two very important things – providing better customer experience and from the store’s perspective it utilizes time customers stand in line to promote the products you want to sell the most.
“They’re not going to buy it the first time, but it starts creating an awareness and a level of comfort,” Bernal said. “With the incredible variety of products that you have available, and it’s just more interesting, right?”
She added that retail merchandising addresses “extreme information disparity environment” where there could be up to 1000 different SKUs (stock keeping units) on the menu. She pointed out that people …