Episode 66: Bridging the Gap: How Companies Doing Good Connects Cannabis and Community

Emily Wells  00:11

Hey there cannabis marketing community. I’m Emily wells, the membership manager here at cannabis Marketing Association, and you’re tuned in to another episode of Party like a marketer. Today’s guest is Courtney Mathis MNm, CEO and co founder of companies doing good, and co founder of the cannabis Impact Fund. She believes in the power of people and business to make extraordinary impact. Her businesses aim to build a purpose driven economy where people and planet are prioritized. She has 15 years experience in social impact consulting, where her primary focus has been to innovate on equitable and purposeful best business practices. She specializes in building social responsibility programs for businesses, elevating nonprofit programs and creating innovative storytelling. Courtney trains speaks and advises on equitable policy initiatives across the US and Canada, and her cup is the most full when outside enjoying the Colorado outdoors with her family and friends.

Lisa Buffo  01:06

Okay, welcome everybody to today’s episode of Party like a marketer, the podcast dedicated to cannabis marketing, public relations and authentic storytelling. Today’s guest is Courtney Mathis, the founder and CEO of companies doing good. Courtney, thank you so much for joining us on the show. Thanks,

Courtney Mathis  01:22

Lisa, thanks so much for having me. It’s good to be here. It’s good to be with you.

Lisa Buffo  01:26

Yes, it is such a pleasure, and I’m excited to talk with you and have this episode, which will be a little bit different than our typical episodes, and we’ll get into that and why and what it is that you do. But first, could you introduce yourself to the audience and just tell them a little bit about your professional background. What did you do prior to starting CDG? And let’s talk about CDG and what that stands for today.

Courtney Mathis  01:52

Cool. Yeah. Gosh. You know, I always feel like when you meet folks in cannabis, it’s really that life is like a lattice, not a ladder, right? People have such varied experiences, and we’re usually coming from, like crazy work experiences in the corporate world or the nonprofit world, or the industrial world or the agricultural world, and bringing our skills into the space. And so that has really been my story. Prior to cannabis, I was a nonprofit consultant. My master’s in nonprofit management, did that for about a decade. Prior to that, I was an environmental activist and did a ton of research in the Mississippi Gulf and in the Puget Sound so pretty much my whole life. What the story is is that I I love community. I care a lot about sustainability. I care a lot about community impact. And in the journey of working with nonprofits and on the research side, just by myself, continuously dissatisfied with the outcome, right? We’re not making change fast enough. Our neighbors are still eating out of trash cans. We have folks who are still, you know, houseless. We have animals that continue to be beaten and abused. We have environmental ecosystems that continue to suffer degradation, and like the research in the nonprofit sector, are trying their hardest to make change. And I just thought, well, can we come up with something a little bit different to expedite the social change that I think is really necessary for people to thrive? And that was the birth of cannabis doing good. It was really 10 years ago, Kelly and I, my business partner, sitting back and saying, We have this really vulnerable sector. The cannabis industry is up and coming. People don’t understand it. They don’t view cannabis as a community asset. Oftentimes, they view cannabis as a villain in their story and in their neighborhood. And then you have the nonprofit sector, which is constantly looking for resources and at a deficit of serving people, because they can’t ever seem to get ahead of serving the people that they that they’re supposed to. So really, at a basic level, cannabis doing good was was created to match cannabis companies with nonprofits so that we can continue to help our neighbors. And so that’s where it started, and we did it for about a decade, which is crazy. I can’t believe we’re in cannabis for a decade. You know, it’s like being knee deep in mud. It’s not easy. Yeah, it’s like, you know, it’s just it was, it was, the last 10 years have been some of the most liberating and and fun and adventurous and exciting, and I’ve totally grown up as a person. I’m 40 years old now, so I feel like I’ve really grown into the person I’m going to be. And I got to do that in cannabis. So like, what a gift, and also what a wild ride. And so after doing that for 10 years, we really sat back and looked at all of this, this decade of work that we had done, and the IP that we had built, and our process, our very unique approach to social impact consulting, which is what cannabis doing good. It was functionally, was, was a social impact agency. And we thought, how can we make our work more accessible? How can we expand what we’re doing? Cannabis is moving, but it’s still. Being slow, that’s the truth. And so we’re, prior to starting cannabis doing good, we’re looking around the world and going, there’s there’s so much change, there’s so much need. How do we make it go faster? We started cannabis doing good, and we started looking around the cannabis industry and going, there’s still so much need. There’s still so much good to be done. So we decided to really expand and rebrand our business by calling it companies doing good, which allows us to not only serve cannabis, but to serve industries across the world. And so that’s what we’ve been doing for the last year, is building and rebuilding companies doing good, which is our new iteration of cannabis, doing good, which still functions as a similar framework. We are a social impact agency that provides social impact consulting, and we launched our recent landmark give back program.

Lisa Buffo  05:47

Thank you for that. That’s a really good backstory and full disclosure for the audience. Many of you know, I do do some consulting work as well, in addition to CMA, and I have been working with Courtney as a fractional cmo for probably just shy of a year, now, maybe little less than that, but we definitely started our conversations around last fall, as you were considering this switch and launching the gift back program. And so it’s been really a pleasure and treat to see how much it’s grown and changed and shifted over the last year. So I’m really excited to share insights on that with the audience, because it really applies to cannabis businesses as a whole, but also as well as any other companies, products and services and business leaders who are looking to create change in ways that are easy and more accessible. That is a need I hear up here come up all the time in my conversations with folks in this community. So really glad to talk about that, and I’ll given I’ll talk about some marketing anecdotes and how that applies as well.

Courtney Mathis  06:49

So let’s fully we should really take a pause here and honor the fact that Lisa, we started talking almost a year ago, and really, with your support, allowed us to rebrand, right? If you remember, I was not sure. I was like, This feels really scary. Yeah, not sure if we should go outside of cannabis. Like, this is my home. This is our industry. But we were seeing so much potential and hemp and lots of other industries, and we were just, I feel like I was calling you every week just saying, I don’t know if we should do this. Like, I’m feeling really nervous about the rebrand, and I really appreciated so much of your advice, because you have given me two pieces of advice that I seriously wake up and listen to every single day, and they’re this, and I for everyone listening, you have to know this is like the best of Lisa buffo advice. One is you always say, trust your gut, your instinct is almost always right. And the second thing you always tell me is, follow the money, right? Like, you know, when it comes to running a business, it’s not that we’re just following money to make money, but if as a business, when you’re rebranding and trying new things, when you have people buying into the things that you’re trying, it’s pretty good validation point that this is the way our business should go and grow. And you know, we were having all this interest outside the industry, and you said, it feels like you know the that market is telling you something, that there’s, like, a need, a want and desire for you to do this outside of cannabis, so trust your gut and follow the growth. And that’s kind of what we’ve done. And that’s really almost so late because of your advice, and like you being in my ear every step of the way saying you can do this, we got this, it’s going to be okay. So I just want to give you, like all the props and the flowers you deserve, because we have grown so much. Our business is thriving more today than it has in years. And I really credit your advice and your belief in our mission and in this work for for getting there. So I have, we have to just pause and give you your flowers, because you deserve it.

Lisa Buffo  08:43

Thank you. I so appreciate that, and I you’ve made it very easy, because I’m just following a very strong leader, and I have known Courtney for almost 10 years in this space, so I have also seen you, you and Kelly, and all the work you’ve done for many cannabis companies, and all the good that it’s done, and it’s just been so obvious and such a shoe in that it’s just, it’s easy to build on something like that when there is such thought and heart and demand into the point about follow money is it’s, it’s, you know, building where there is demand. And I remember when I started CMA and my entrepreneurship journey, reading the Lean Startup, which was, I mean, it sort of is still startup lore, where it’s one of the first, you know, Intro to entrepreneurship books you read, and it’s a long book, but essentially, the whole thing is, don’t build products people don’t want. It’s like, just because you think it’s a good idea or you like it, or it makes sense to you, doesn’t mean people actually want it. And so build where there’s demand, and solve a problem that is a problem in the marketplace and a problem that exists, and you have done that really well, and the market is asking for your your services, so that makes it, that makes it much easier to do

Courtney Mathis  09:53

the really easy thing to miss. You know, I think that’s coming from like a marketing and messaging and storytelling, right? We can. Have, you know, there are very few lightning in a bottles where you can, like, basically, sell utter crap to people. You know, generally speaking, you do need demand and market excitement for your storytelling and your marketing efforts to be received and be successful, you know. And I think that, yeah, I think there’s just so much wisdom, because it’s really easy just to throw a bunch of shit at the wall and hope that something sticks, and people buy into your story, people buy into your values and your mission, that people buy into your services or your products, and you can waste so much time and energy, I feel like trying a lot of different things, and that is inherently what startup is, but I feel like the combination of your advice is what’s gotten us here quickly, because it has been following instinct from all of us on the team, right as well as leaning into what are we hearing from the market? Like, is what we’re doing working. And so we try something really small and then make a small pivot. Then we try something really small and make a small pivot. And so we I feel like we’ve grown slow, but I feel like we’re growing really smartly, yeah, you know. And again, I think that’s from your your wisdom, and having done this for a really long time, and done marketing and storytelling for a really long time. So it’s been really cool. It’s been a cool evolution to have been in business 10 years, functionally start over, which is what it feels like, you know, I feel like we’re building a brand new business. And rather than 10 years ago, when we started cannabis doing good, it was definitely this is a value of Kelly and I’s and how do we get other people to buy into our values? Now the mindset is, of course, we’re led, and our compass is our values, but our new approach is we know that that people, inherently Gen Z millennials, want to do good. We know that business owners want to do good, and we’re not appealing to their values. We’re actually appealing to their business sense. By saying, giving back to your community, supporting your employees and caring for the planet, it’s going to grow your business 100 times over, right? There’s so much good data about how, in, you know, five to seven years, purpose driven businesses are outperforming even their fortune 500 competitors that have no corporate social responsibility program. And so it’s been such an interesting transition, because again, I think originally, we’re selling values. Can we get people to believe what we believe? And now I’m like, I’m not selling values. We’re selling a business strategy, right, which is, can we deploy and implement a business strategy around social impact that’s not only going to grow your business and retain your employees, but it’s also going to benefit the people in your community and the planet that we live on? And that’s a much easier conversation to have, because I can tell you, it took years of exhaustion and emotional turmoil meeting with clients and feeling like, oh, they just don’t have the values. They just don’t get it. And now I’m like, I don’t actually care if you get it. I don’t care why you do the right thing. I just want you to do the right thing. And if we can make doing the right thing the easy thing, then we’ve achieved our goal as an agency.

Lisa Buffo  13:01

Yes. And I do want to get into your theory of change and what that means. And I also want to reiterate your point that you’re taking you’re not just, this isn’t just feel good, woo, woo. It is that there is data, there is hard facts, there is profit driven motives like those things can be aligned. And there are facts in research of over lots of time and over lots of companies, that show how this actually translates into business success and feels good and is the right thing to do. So I do want to get into the give back program, but to just ground the audience in what companies doing good does is there’s two main areas of the business. There’s consulting, and then there’s the give back program. Let’s talk consulting briefly, and then we’ll talk about the give back program and explain that and how it works, particularly with that cannabis lens. And then we can tie that into the theory of change that you’ve educated me so much on. But can you first speak to those two different services and what they are

Courtney Mathis  13:58

totally Yeah. So again, consulting is kind of our bread and butter. It’s what we’ve done the longest. It’s what people know us for. And you know, to my happy surprise, it is the thing that I don’t have to sell so hard, because people just we get a lot of word of mouth referral and a lot of support for our process. And so our social impact consulting is really a matter of companies come to us inevitably with a handful of pain points, and the pain point changes on the on the company. Sometimes it’s employee turnover and culture, sometimes it’s market differentiation. Sometimes it is actually that the leadership or the founders have had a little bit of success and giving back was always intended to be part of their mission, but they don’t know how. And sometimes it’s that they will actually want to engage and have a more deeper relationship with their customer. And there’s a lot of different pain points that isn’t all of them, but inevitably, we’re talking with a business, and we’re trying to understand, first, what is the business pain point that they have? And is social impact a pathway to help them solve that problem, help them solve that challenge? And. A lot of times what that looks like is working with a company to understand what are your core values. These are different than like your company values that you list on your website that say, like we care about, you know, capital letter, integrity and passion and, you know, on all those things. And so we sort of say, but our values are actually really about what is the legacy that you want to leave behind. And so one of the really easy ways to get at legacy is the headline exercise, which I know all of us in marketing have used at one point in time. But it’s basically sitting down with any founder or leader and say, hey, you know the New York Times or the westward or this particular publication puts you on the Sunday cover your you are the cover story, and there’s a headline. What does it say about you? Do? You know, 100% of the time that we ask that question to a business leader, they never talk about how much money they make or how many businesses they’ve served. They always talk about the impact they’ve had in community. Because all all businesses are started with a mission, and when you’re trying to establish social impact, you’re really trying to uncover and distill what are the core values that led you to start your business, even if someone says initially it was to make a lot of money, money is just a tool to get it something you value. Do you value more free time, right? Do you want more time with your family? Do you want to engage in more philanthropy, right? Do you want to travel to Peru and save the rainforest like I, you know? I don’t know. There’s a lot of different reasons that people want money. And so let’s say someone comes and says, Well, I want to I want to make a lot of money because I’d like to stop working sooner rather than later, because I want time with my family. Then you begin to uncover more of their core values. So family is really important to them. Why is family so important to them? And the truth is, is sometimes you get a really personal parts of people’s story. Sometimes those people lost their parents early. They didn’t have right the family community, or they wanted maybe they had a brother or sister or grandparent that’s passed away and time is short, so all they want is to squeeze in every last moment. And I know that some of this stuff sounds mushy, but from a very basic exercise of asking a company, what does someone say about your company in 10 years? What is the headline? You start to uncover the values, and then you even go even further under the curtain to get those core values about why is family so important? Let’s say that they had a parent that they lost to cancer. For me, bingo, I’m like, instantly you want to make a lot of money because you want more time with your family, and maybe because you want to support or make an influence on cancer research or the progression of cancer research. So then we can pull back from that and go as a social impact strategy. As a business, it sounds like you really care about families, and you know family services and about cancer research in that journey, we almost instantly have to find their social impact pillars right to understand, okay, here are the values that govern your your the value of your here are the values that govern the impact that you want to leave in the world. And here are your social impact pillars, Family Services, cancer research. And then we go through the work of really trying to determine what is their investment budget. You’ve got time, talent and treasure. Every business has those three things. You may have more or less of some of those. You may have less resource and more time. You may have less time and more and more talent, which is like in kind services. And so after we develop this investment budget, we figure out, okay, we know who you are. We know what your core impact pillars are. We’ve got your investment budget, which is, what is the time talent, treasure you want to spend? Then we get the really fun work of getting to identify who, who are the nonprofit partners that we can help introduce you to and build a program around, and some and in that we’re looking at community partner criteria. For example, maybe it’s really important to you because your business goal was to increase company culture and reduce employee turnover. So let’s go back to that and say, Okay, well, if one of the goals, if your social impact pillar is family services, but one of your business goals is employee retention, then do we find our goal is to find a nonprofit that works with families, that allows your employees to volunteer, right? Because we know that volunteering helps build intrinsic value and self worth. It also helps create affinity towards the brand. If you can offer paid time off for volunteering, right? There’s all these benefits of company sponsored volunteering. And so that’s sort of a long winded story about how we go through the work of consulting with the business to understand business challenges, core values, building out your pillars, getting an investment budget, and then aligning you with a partner that helps not only achieve your social impact pillars, but also helps address some of your business problems. If we can do all of that, we’ve won the game of social impact strategy, and I’ve just given away all the magic sauce. This is kind of what it is. This is what people do. But I’m okay giving it awake, because the truth is, is that building a social impact strategy is something that every single company should do, and I think that if we could put out that information more readily, right? There’s so much marketing 101 and even de and I, 101, and, you know, HR, one. One, my dream would actually be one day to have social impact. 101, which is like, how to do it in the most basic way. Because if we can just get people started, they may have hiccups, they may have capacity issues. They may have problems with their nonprofit. Maybe they have a PR crisis. There’s going to be all these things that come up. And my agency, our agency, can still address and support them any way they are in their journey. Which brings me to my second point. Let’s say you already have a social impact strategy. The second thing that we have, often have happen, and most often happens in cannabis, is people have started a social impact strategy, but they’re giving to, like, 15 nonprofits. And we’re like, okay, what are your social impact pillars? I’m like, well, we give to, you know, queer organizations during pride month, and we support breast cancer this time of year, and we do a toy drive at Christmas. And they’ve just got all these different things. They don’t actually have social impact pillars to find. So it’s actually really fun to work with businesses who have a clear value for social impact, who have tons of nonprofit partners, but actually to come back to them and rein it in and create an actual strategy to say, let’s get your pillars a little bit more refined. Let’s narrow them down. Let’s actually align them to business goals so we can measure it. So there are KPIs and impact KPIs. So not only are we measuring the impact you’re having in community, but we’re measuring the impact that you’re having in a business. Because if you’re spending money, even if you’re donating it, there should be a positive return to your business. That’s some not something a lot of social impact consultants say, but I believe that 100 times over, because what makes social impact work sustainable is that you can keep doing it again and again and again, which means the business better stay in business and stay profitable. So I want everything that we do to be tied to impact KPIs and business KPIs and so I think that the companies that are coming to us with so much work that they’ve done oftentimes benefit the most from distilling down an actual strategy, getting really clear on pillars. I would tell everyone, if you’ve got more than three nonprofit partners, you probably have too many, right? Most of us don’t have millions of dollars, so we’re not going to we’re not mining million dollars checks. We may have $10,000 or $30,000 or $5,000 that money is going to go a lot further, across three non profits, than $2,500 checks to 10 of them, right? So that’s really what the social impact consulting work of our business is. And I went into the weeds there, because I think that one of the things that makes our process really unique is we really try to understand the person and the values and the reason they started the business. We really try to understand fundamental business goals. And once we do all that work of developing a strategy and coming up with pillars and understanding partnerships and programs, then we get the really incredible task of going back to your employees and saying, which of these pillars do you care most about? Right? We’ve give them. We give them guidelines and barriers. They’re not just going to see. If you give an employee, you know, 20 things that they care about they don’t fall within the parameters of the business. So develop your social impact strategy. Then create space for your employees to respond to it, to make sure that that business goal of reducing employee turnover is met, because now you’ve done something that that’s going to get their buy in they’re also excited about so that when that volunteer company, or when that volunteer opportunity comes up, they’re going to sign up for it. Because you’ve surveyed them and they’ve said, This is what we really care about. And so I think that there’s, there’s so much detail and nuance as to how we do our work, and most CSR is just really basic of walking into a boardroom, mapping out values, coming up with things you care about, and finding a nonprofit and then matching it to KPIs and walking away. I think that our special sauces that we walk in and we really get to know people and understand what is it? What is the legacy that you want to leave behind? Because if we can get at that, then I think the rest of it becomes really easy,

Lisa Buffo  23:55

and I think that’s a really good segue to the give back program. Because essentially what in my mind, from what you’ve just said, and what I know is that the give back program is almost a streamlined, productized way of creating an impact strategy for products. So could you go into that and explain what the give back program is for?

Courtney Mathis  24:17

Yeah, I mean, so the give back program was launched because I just gave you a whole bunch of verbal vomit about how to build a social impact strategy, and one of the major barriers is it takes a lot of time and energy to build that we’re usually looking at 60 to 90 days. And there’s a price tag to that for the team. There are so many companies, particularly in cannabis, who don’t have a ton of extra income upfront, right? They are having to, they would have to pull from their marketing budget, or pull from their HR budget, or, you know, I don’t, they’re gonna, they’d have to, like, magically make up money through sponsorships. Right? Finding dollars to pay for social impact up front in cannabis in particular, has been very challenging outside. Side of cannabis. If you’re a startup or you’re a small business and you have less than a million dollar budget, it’s also really hard to justify spending money on a social impact strategy, because you’re trying to reinvest every one of your dollars into your products or into your growth. And people don’t often associate social impact with growth. They associate it with success. If I have a successful business, I can have a social impact program not to have a growing business, and I want success, so I’m going to build a social impact program. It’s flawed thinking, but it is oftentimes what people think right is that social impact only happens when I have success, and so because budget is such a challenge, we sort of sat back and said, How do we right? Our mission is to make the right thing. The easy thing is to create people loving planet centered businesses that help communities thrive. How do we do that in a little bit more of an success, accessible way? And so we came up with the GET BACK program, which is it? I’ll say this, the give back program is something that I am the most excited about. I think everyone on our team is really excited about it, because it shows so much promise, because it really is easy, and the way that it works is, let’s say we’ll use, we’ll use a can of will use cannabis company. We’ll just use a generic cannabis company. Actually, no, how about this? Let’s use a cannabis company. We’re actually working with. Actually working with. So we’ve worked, been working with sphere X. They’re a vape company located here in Colorado, and we did some initial work with them to build out their social impact strategy. And in our work with them and understanding the social impact strategy on the consulting side, on the consulting side. Yeah, clarification. So we’re working with them on the consulting side, but during our process of working with them on the consulting side, what we understood was they were doing a lot of seasonal give back partnerships, meaning, when they had a seasonal skew, or it was pride month, or it was Breast Cancer Awareness Month, they were doing these sort of temporary give back partnerships, where it’s like every purchase of this product goes to benefit a nonprofit. So we knew they already had a value for doing something like that. And the reason they were doing that is because they don’t, they don’t have a separate, at the time, a separate social impact budget, excuse me, so they didn’t have a separate social impact budget, so they were using their customers and their product sales to back up their social impact strategy. And so we said to them, we think we can help you do that better, because so many times cannabis companies pick a seasonal skew, or they pick a month they run a temporary promotion, and they say, every time you buy this, join, or every time you buy this like rainbow colored can, or every time you buy this pink flower wrapping, it goes to support breast cancer, it goes to support Pride Month. But these are temporary. They’re usually running them for 3060, 90 days. What we know is that any sort of cause marketing that is developed should be run at least for 12 months, if not a minimum of 24 months, because cause marketing’s primary goal is to build and a relationship based upon affinity with your customer. That is what the GET BACK program does. And so spirit, when we went to spirits and we said, we want to partner with your product, the summer rose a and every purchase of that product is going to go to benefit la fortaleza familiar, which is an organization that serves the bipoc, queer and trans community, and the way the fund, the mechanics of that work, for sphere x in particular, is $1 every single time that’s that summer rose sold goes back to the give back program. This arrangement looks different for every company, but for sphere x, we’ll let’s just use easy math and say 50 cents goes to their nonprofit partner, and 50 cents goes to CDG. You say, Why would they give you 50 cents of their kid back program? So what that business gets in exchange is we spent two years trademarking our badge, which is a geometric heart with CDG in the middle. If you go to our website, companies doinggood.org, you can see this badge everywhere. We badge companies as a company doing good, and then we launch a really intense and customized marketing cause, marketing strategy that educates their customer and their audience about the purpose behind their product. So they say, every single time summer Jose is purchased, it benefits. La Fortaleza. Our end goal is for every single customer that walks in the door when they’re given the choice between two vape products, they’re going to choose sphere x, because they’re purpose driven and because they align with our values. Right? Again, we know speaking of Gen Z and millennials, they’re making crazy intrinsic, purpose driven choices all of the time. We want to move that from intrinsic behavior to intentional behavior, and the way that we do that is by educating them. And so the purpose of the give back program is to take a percentage of sales, or a portion of your product per product sales, right? Those are two ways that we do it, and build a massive storytelling campaign that allows us to build a relationship with your customer based on purpose. Products that will keep them coming back to you again and again and again. Because we know that if we can first build brand affinity with your customer and your product or your business, and we can do it well enough and long enough, getting that 12 to 24 month timeline, then we get to customer acquisition, which is what everyone is after. How do I get new customers? How do I keep the customers I have and keep them loyal to me? And how do I get new customers? And that is the whole intention of the GET BACK program. And the vision is that you’re gonna be able to walk into Target and you’re gonna look at two different shampoos. One shampoo maybe has vegan Fair Trade B Corp. Second shampoo has vegan fair trade, B Corp and CDG, and you see the CDG mark right next to all the other marks. And you know, this is a product that gives back to purpose. You can go to our website, you can go to theirs, you can scan a QR code, and you can see exactly how much money has been donated to whom, and what’s the impact that that product is having. And then we have customers walking in, making choices, not only on their intrinsic values, but from intentional education that they’ve been delivered, that this is a purpose driven product, and I think that we’re seeing so much promise here. We’re having a lot of momentum in cannabis, which has been really fun, although there are challenges there, which I’m happy to talk about. And we’re seeing a lot of interest outside of cannabis, because let’s face it, profit margins, revenue margins, are just less we they don’t have the type they don’t have 280 they don’t have the taxation problem that cannabis has. So there’s just a little more revenue. So we’re seeing the Give Up program be wildly successful outside of cannabis, but for the cannabis companies that are doing it with us and doing it, well, we’re seeing a ton of success. And here’s the fun thing, if you’re a business owner, you’re maybe thinking, how do you prove that this is working? There’s one data point that I’m really interested in, which is sell through rate. I want to know how quickly that SKU is selling. So you can take one SKU that was selling last year, or one product or entire brand that was selling last year, you take that data, then you have year two where we’re putting your work, badging you as a company, doing good, and launching a cause marketing, storytelling campaign, and partnering with a nonprofit, getting your brand to be known for a cause, whether it’s housing, hunger relief, you know, sustainability, etc, and we can compare sell through rate from the previous year to this year, and if we see an increased sell through rate, which is kind of like, you know, it’s not, it’s like the velocity, right? How quickly your product is selling, and it’s increased when you become purpose driven. And then we do it again and again in the months following and the quarters following, we’re actually able to prove that your sell through rate increased over time because you were a purpose driven product. And that data is really cool, and it’s actually what most business owners care about. We know customer acquisition takes a hot minute to get to, but brand affinity can be measured and sell through rate, and that’s really exciting, and that’s data that we’re getting our hands on right now.

Lisa Buffo  32:56

Yeah, thank you for describing that because well, and obviously I’ve been working in as a fractional cmo for you. And one of the things I’ve learned through CMA and my work cmoing and other positions prior to this, is that, and what we talk about in cannabis over and over again, is that it takes time to educate your customers about who you are, what you do, and in such a competitive, hotly competitive, contested market that can be also very hyper local, right? Like when we talk about certain brands or certain dispensaries, you are literally fighting for customers within your immediate neighborhood and community. And if those brands are also creating impact pillars and giving back to nonprofits that have impact in their immediate neighborhood and community, you’re adding essentially, what is a product trait or product differentiation? That to your point about vegan, B, Corp, et cetera. As those things become a bit more normalized and they’re no longer differentiators, you are going to need something on top of that. And it’s also become very clear, as we’ve seen larger standard CPG, products have to update their marketing, to be more in just the way that they do business, to be more sustainable, to be more ethical, to have traits that appeal to those purpose driven consumers, which is increasingly the dominant demographic, as proven by millennial and Gen Z shopping habits. But it’s also happening just across the board and across demographics as a whole. So it is playing to what you have learned in your nonprofit work and business work as an entrepreneur yourself over the last decade plus, but also what’s happening on a broader cultural, societal shift that I’m only gonna say trend, for lack of a better word, but it’s really becoming more the norm, and that’s happening at a quicker and accelerated rate, as we see, you know, the state of the world and things changing so so much and so fast. And as entrepreneurs are becoming younger and and starting businesses like we’ve seen beauty be disrupted. You’re I know you’re a mom, and we’ve talked about your the kids you buy your toys, those are being disrupted by entrepreneurs who are starting these. From that values based place as a whole. And we see it in cannabis all the time, and we talk about it on this podcast all the time. And there’s so many cannabis founders with amazing stories who are doing this for certain reasons, and it is really important to pull that story out and tell it in a really thoughtful and conscientious way. And there’s one, there’s an aspect of doing that in marketing, in your communications, in your materials, but then there’s another, putting your money where your mouth is and actually doing it through action, and taking the action and making sure that story is being told. Because sometimes it goes both ways, where folks can do a lot of talking but not a lot of action, or folks can do a lot of action but not a lot of talking about it. And neither really serves a purpose. But the gift back program threads that needle where you’re doing the talking and you’re doing the action, but there’s really conscientious marketing, brain and thought and strategy behind the storytelling, as opposed to just, oh, folks will pick up on this, right? This is really obvious, and one of the examples we talk about, and I use pretty publicly, is like Tom’s shoes. They kind of came out of nowhere when they did that, that thing about 10 years ago with the one for one, but everybody knew that association. Those shoes weren’t particularly cute. They weren’t part. I mean, they were fine, but they weren’t particularly different or innovative. But they had that model, and everyone knew what it was. Everyone knew what it stood for. That founder was everywhere talking about it. They had the numbers, and they were overnight sensation, relatively speaking, in business terms, and had a ton of success, which allowed them to scale their impact, and that is what you have seen in your work. Actually Work, and has been proven across industries, product categories, etc. So thank you for clarifying and for the audience listening. If you are interested in the give back program, please reach out to myself or Courtney happy to talk to you about it, get you more on board and explain how this can work for you, whether you are in cannabis or not. Again, part of the rebrand was to create a broader umbrella and broader net. But it does work for products and services of different categories.

Courtney Mathis  36:58

It does and you also speak to a point that I want to like Echo to, which is that everyone today, regardless of your religious belief, your political belief, your your spiritual disposition, your social disposition, increasingly, I think there is a sense of Folks feeling not empowered. How do I make the change that I want again, regardless of where you are on any spectrum? And what we know is that the greatest power we have as a consumer is our dollar, because businesses markets, stock markets, entire economies bend like the wind to the whim of consumer demand, and so our power is our dollar. And if we can give customers a choice beyond product proximity and price, which is how traditionally, we view customers making decisions, right? Is it a product I want at a location that’s convenient at a price point I can afford? But if we can add purpose and give customers their power back through good education and storytelling that they every dollar they spend goes back to building a world that they want that’s pretty damn awesome, right? Because we get to completely build stakeholder capitalism, and stakeholder capitalism is actually taking it looking at Commerce as not a way to appease and grow your shareholders. You’re looking at economy as a tool to actually enhance lives, save the planet, if that’s what you care about, care for your family, care for your neighbors, fuel education, fuels research, right? There’s so much potential there, when we have stakeholder capitalism where we actually give people that fourth p at which to basically cast their vote, right? This is what I care about, and I think that’s really fucking cool, actually. I think that’s one of the coolest things that we’re doing, is re empowering customers and telling them that they have a choice and how and where they shop. And cannabis, people have been resistant to that because they’re so price sensitive, so that 1p that price point people get really choked up about. But what we know is that if you can commit beyond the 30 to 60 days, if you can commit to a give back program with really good storytelling for 12 to 24 months, you will come out ahead, because you’re going to build affinity, which is going to translate to loyalty, which is going to create brand ambassadors, which is going to lead to customer acquisition, and you will be a product that stays on shelves and grows on shelves. And all you got to do is build purpose into your business.

Lisa Buffo  39:37

Yes, and two things I want to mention to that we know in cannabis, that while folks are price sensitive, that sticking to your values and sticking to what your beliefs are does create that brand loyalty and has proven itself. And I’ll say this, and I will quote Joe Hodes, who folks may know is the president of. Of brands, former CMO, but he’s a CMO by trade. That is his background. I’ve sat on many a panel with Joe and spoken to him at length about marketing philosophy, and he’s amazing and without butchering his words, but essentially what he has said and communicated is that as Juana has expanded, they obviously and for those listening, is one of the leading edibles and gummy brands in the country, founded in Boulder around, I think it was 2009 but early days, and has been grown and expanded and is still a market leader. That when they go to new states, they they don’t compromise on their price. They’re very solid with it. They don’t try to compete on that. They say, these are our products. These are, this is, you know, this is what we charge for them. This is what it’s worth. And they may, they still are a dominant player. They still have insane market share because they know that their their value and their quality is there, and they’re willing to stick with their customer who can afford that and values that. And I know that you’ve done some work with them as well, and they do have a really amazing gift

Courtney Mathis  41:00

Social Impact Program, yeah, one that’s the thing is that wanna has stuck to their price, they stuck to their quality and expanded their impact, which I believe in both Nancy and Joe was with, was what has allowed them to expand their brand. They have one of the most robust social impact programs in in the cannabis world by a long shot. And then, of course, we have the wanna Foundation, which was recently started by Nancy Whiteman. And so, yes, CDG has, we have done a ton of work with wanna to help them build that. And there’s such a good case use of an organization that stayed committed to they who they were as a product, but they use purpose as a way to expand their own growth. And they’ve seen it, you know, return back to them again and again and again. And I think that’s a really beautiful testimony for for what it means people may say, Yeah, well, cannabis has and, or wanna has endless capital. And I think that’s the thing, is that the give back program is attached to your revenue and or your product. It doesn’t matter what your budget is, anyone can do give back in cannabis, is my belief, and so we encourage companies of all sizes to engage in this program. Because you know, what you’re ultimately doing is getting your customer to pay for your your Social Impact Program. And what we know is that they’re happy to do it. We know that if given a choice between a purpose driven product and a non purpose driven product of similar quality and value that 65 to 75% of the time the customer is going to choose the purpose driven product. So you know folks who feel nervous about their their price margins in cannabis, just know that purpose will return growth back to you in exponential numbers if you actually commit to it and the storytelling that goes

Lisa Buffo  42:41

with it, and that’s what one has done so successfully. That’s why folks can say they have endless capitals, because they have baked the strategy in from the start and from the early days, and it’s worked. So they’ve been able to scale up. And I also want to add that when you say customer, there’s that’s a broader definition, because that includes B to b2 and some of CD G’s clients in the give back program are Packaging Companies that are actually selling to brands. There. It’s a business to business transaction. So it’s not always that B to C consumer facing person who works in the dispenser or who walks into the dispensary, while that is often a lot of the case. But this also applies on the B to B side as well, and in some cases. Don’t want to say it’s necessarily easier, but you are speaking directly to that business, to business case in those transactions, and can kind of get to the heart of that, you know, everything we’ve talked about today pretty quickly,

Courtney Mathis  43:32

pretty quickly. Yeah, we we that that’s the beauty of our work, is that whether you’re doing social impact consulting or doing the GET BACK program, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an ancillary service or a product company or a service based company. There are so many pathways to integrate social impact into everything that you’re doing. And yeah, whether I think that when you think about packaging companies or ancillary companies, I think that you still get even in cannabis, if you’re a lighting company, if you’re a lighting company that’s actually giving back to sustainability and looking at alternative energy sources, you may not be a solar company, and maybe solar isn’t what you’re doing, but maybe you can contribute to research or a nonprofit that is contributing to alternative energies. That’s a huge value add for the industry and for the end customer, because, again, if the customer knows that the lighting you use in your greenhouse is fueling sustainability measures over the long run, if you can communicate that the customer is going to keep choosing that product because it has a partnership with that lighting company, and so everyone in that food chain benefits, right? The lighting company benefits because that that as soon as that brand starts seeing success, then all of its competitors gonna go, oh, I should also work with that lighting company. And I should work with that lighting company. And you know what I want, every single cannabis company there is, yes, we want to use this for market differentiation. But every single company, whether you’re cannabis or non cannabis, should do social impact, because the customers who align with your values are the ones that are going to find you you. Could, there could be two lighting companies or two shoe companies or two beauty companies. One of them gives back to hunger, one of them gives back to housing. Great. Those are great fucking choices. I want to, I want to always be making those decisions. To say, You know what, for the entire month of November, I’m only going to shop companies that give back to, you know, hunger relief. And for the entire, you know, summer, I’m only going to shop companies that work on housing or immigration or education, you know, I think that that’s a really cool imagine where that’s an actual deciding factor in our choices. And so I think that all the way through the food chain, you’re going to see growth and potential there. And I went off on a tangent, but it mostly to say we work with everyone, because at the end of the day, everyone in your chain, whether you’re a service provider or a product an ancillary service, every part of your business benefits from purpose. Because at the end of the day, if the customer shows up for that product or that service, you know that they’re showing up for your purpose, also.

Lisa Buffo  46:02

And the last thing I’ll say is that people may be like, Oh, why are you talking nonprofits and social impact strategy on a Marketing podcast? But essentially, this is just code switching for saying that we speak all the time this podcast, literally in the description of this podcast, is about authentic marketing and authenticity in business. And when you actually do this and implement this, you are you are not engineering authenticity. You are baking it into your company, and you are baking it into your strategy. And when you know and have seen proof that it works, you are essentially doing marketing as smart as is known to as it exists. It’s as smart and thoughtful as you can do is to actually have authenticity baked into your products, baked into your company culture, baked into your communication and your strategy, so that everything that you’re doing and touching as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as a marketer is being cleanly, thoughtfully and tangibly communicated internally and Extra internally to your team and your stakeholders and externally to your customers. And when you build a business, I’ll just keep using toms, for example, because that’s sort of the pop culture thing. People know it is almost impossible to not have success, and that’s so just an obvious shoe in but it does need to be communicated, it stated. So Courtney, I’m really glad we took the time today to discuss that. It’s just

Courtney Mathis  47:25

marketing right. Social Impact is authentic action with impactful storytelling. And so can we, can we figure it out how to do that? And so so much. I mean, Lisa, you were one of the very first hires into our company, and it’s because we immediately recognized we need innovative, smart, tactical, strategic, measurable and impactful storytelling for this to work. It doesn’t work. We don’t have good marketing. And marketing at its best is good storytelling. Marketing at its worst is just peddling products and price. Want to move above peddling products and price. I want to move into storytelling purpose, and we need good marketing for that and that. You know, full circle the thing of our conversation, but that’s why we brought you on and your expertise when we first started to consider relaunching this business, because it is critical to what we’re doing. Because we don’t have a conversation with our customer, you can be giving all the dollars in the world. But if you if your customer doesn’t know it, if your end user doesn’t know it, and you don’t have a conversation with them about it, you’re never going to see the business benefit of doing it. And again, we need the business to benefit, because I need your business, everyone’s business, to be wildly successful, so we can keep showing up for community need. And so that it all boils down to good marketing, frankly, which I’m learning like the most from you every single day. Yes, I’m like a bleeding heart, right? I’m the social impact person. You’re the storyteller. But it’s why, it’s why we get to do this really cool work together. And so everyone in marketing should walk away from this feeling like, even if your company doesn’t have a good strategic social impact program, there’s purpose baked in to your company, I’m sure of it, find it, talk about it, distill it, get excited about it, and start building a customer conversation. Regardless of who your customer is about, the reason you started your business and the impact that you want to have, those are easy things to do. Just start the conversation.

Lisa Buffo  49:19

Well, Courtney, if folks want to get in touch with you or learn more about CDG. How can they do that?

Courtney Mathis  49:25

So we are companies doing good.org. Please go to our website. We’ve had a simple refresh, but it’s there. You can find us on Instagram and Facebook, which is CDG, socials. You can find us on LinkedIn, as companies doing good, and of course, you can find me. You can email me directly. It’s just Courtney at kind colorado.org for those of you that know, a long time ago in cannabis and still today, we all had to have holding companies because we couldn’t bank. So Courtney at kind Colorado is my email because kind Colorado was our original entity. But please get in touch. You can find us again. And website, LinkedIn, Instagram, socials, and email me directly. We’d love to get in touch and talk more. And the truth is, for all the marketers in the world listening, if you think that you have a better idea of a way we could do this work, let us know. And we’re all ears. We’re here to learn. We’re growing, and we’re growing really quickly, and we have a whole lot of marketers on our team, led by Lisa buffo, our fearless CMO. And of course, we’re open to suggestions. So if you have a company that you love, that you think we should know, if you have a strategy that we haven’t talked about, that you think we should deploy, or if you’re someone that wants to work with work with us in the future, just get in touch. We’re here for it.

Lisa Buffo  50:39

Thank you, Courtney. It was such a pleasure to have you. Today. We will link all of the of CDG socials on the show notes, and you can also reach out to me. You all have my email, Lisa at marketing cannabis.org, happy to put you in touch with Courtney, and we’ll do a follow up to this conversation as well.

Courtney Mathis  50:56

Thanks, Lisa. Thanks so much. Thanks

Lisa Buffo  50:58

for having me. Thank you. Thank you everybody for tuning in. Please subscribe to this podcast. We’re also on YouTube, where you can see the video version. And if you’d like to connect with the CMA community, please visit us at the Cannabis Marketing association.com or on social media at Canna marketing. You can also sign up for our newsletter on our website to stay up to date with new episodes, tools, insight, blog posts and more from the CMA community, and hear from our members. And if you’re interested in learning more about membership or becoming a guest on the show, please reach out to our team at [email protected], see you next week.

— Transcribed by otter.ai