Lifestyle Branding: What Is the Medical Cannabis Lifestyle?
Lifestyle branding is something we have all had experience with to some degree. Brands make extensive use of it to give their products and services a bit of ‘sex appeal’. Lifestyle branding is even utilized by the legal cannabis industry. But is it appropriate to medical cannabis? And if so, what is the medical cannabis lifestyle?
Cookies is one of the more well-known brands in the cannabis industry. The brand markets itself as representing a lifestyle of excellence, quality, and taste. They also associate their brand with customers living their best lives. Does any of this apply to medical cannabis? Absolutely.
Beehive Farmacy, in Salt Lake City, UT, explains that lifestyle branding is very appropriate to medical cannabis, especially when you step back and think about why patients would even use cannabis products from Cookies. They suggest that a good avenue to understanding it is to think about a patient who suffers from debilitating chronic pain.
Chronic Pain Impacts Everything
The unfortunate truth about chronic pain is that it impacts everything. As any chronic pain patient can testify, experiencing pain day in and day out affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. It causes undue stress and mental anguish. It causes physical discomfort.
Chronic pain patients are known to limit their activities. They are known to limit their social interactions, even becoming completely isolated in some cases. Worst of all, chronic pain can be a precursor to mental health conditions like depression and anxiety.
When Cannabis Makes a Difference
When medical cannabis makes a difference to how pain is experienced, that difference can be remarkable. Some patients whose pain is otherwise debilitating suddenly find that medical cannabis gives them their lives back. They feel better physically. They experience less mental and emotional stress.
Medical cannabis helps a lot of chronic pain patients resume past activities they had since abandoned. It helps them get out of the house, be more social, enjoy everything the world has to offer. It is a whole different lifestyle. It is a lifestyle that so many chronic pain patients would give anything to experience.
Brands Have To Figure It Out
How all of this translates into lifestyle branding for a company like Cookies isn’t clear. That is for brands to figure out. The point here is that the medical cannabis lifestyle is one that can be defined by taking a look at patients and the kinds of lives they lead after beginning cannabis therapy.
It’s wholly appropriate to apply lifestyle branding to medical cannabis because that’s the whole point of using cannabis medicinally. Cannabis is not a cure for anything, at least as far as we know right now. But it is a fantastic tool for mitigating symptoms. In simple English, medical cannabis helps patients feel better.
When symptoms are alleviated and people feel somewhat normal again, they can pursue the kind of lifestyle that most appeals to them. For cannabis brands, this is the key to utilizing lifestyle branding successfully. It’s about figuring out how to represent a patient’s best possible life, and then market via that image.
You Do What Works
From a business standpoint, lifestyle branding makes sense. You do what works when you are a sales executive trying to appeal to the largest possible audience. And keep in mind that medical cannabis is as much a business as a healthcare product.
Lifestyle branding works in the medical cannabis space. It works because it is appropriate. If nothing else, the successful utilization of medical cannabis therapy can help patients live their best lives. That’s the entire point of giving them access to cannabis in the first place.