Most Cannabis Marketing Fails Because It Is Asked to Solve the Wrong Problems ft. John Shute

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John Shute: ...Man, like we only make two grand a month at this store, but for some reason that 'shop now' and that store locator for that store, they're getting like a thousand clicks a month. That doesn't make any sense. Bryan Fields: John, you're running a midsize cannabis brand and tomorrow your marketing budget gets cut by 50% overnight. What do you kill immediately, and what do you protect at all costs? John Shute: Wow, what a great question. I would kill anything that isn't 100% trackable. Most of the time I guess the question back to you is, is this brand already existing and operating? Bryan Fields: This brand already exists. It's doing very well in a state, and leadership has decided it needs to cut the budget. What do you kill? What's the first thing you're killing? John Shute: I would probably cut my social media budget to start. Bryan Fields: Why? John Shute: Because it's not trackable, and there's a lot of risk in wasting money on it. I think it's an important tool to use at the right time, when you have the right monetization in place. But if I were cutting my budget, I would hold onto the things I have control over — my website, my email marketing, and how I show up on search. I'd lean into free channels to enhance that inbound marketing — for example, being on podcasts like this, going to events, speaking engagements, doing pop-ups, partnerships, and co-marketing campaigns with dispensaries. Those are all things I can monetize and track, and continue to grow my email list with as a brand. That's something a lot of brands don't lean into at all — email marketing and segmenting audiences — because at the end of the day, your social media can just get shut down. People heavily rely on Instagram and other channels, but if you don't have monetization in place, or a way to collect those leads and communicate with them directly, you kind of have nothing. Bryan Fields: Why do you think it's underutilized? Is it a matter of not understanding the core concept of the tool, not understanding what information to provide, or just a misalignment of understanding — okay, here's our goal, our website is our digital footprint, this is the most important way people research us, this is what we're investing in, and email is our tool to say, 'Hey, you're interested in me, here's something specifically tailored for you at the right time'? John Shute: I think it makes sense that it's underutilized just because of how things work for a cannabis brand — it's kind of backwards. When you're a retailer, brick and mortar, you have no choice but to be aggressive on things like SEO, a great site, and your tech stack, because you need people coming through your door every day. For a cannabis brand, when you launch, it's really about getting real estate — what's the point of everything else if you're in zero dispensaries? So the name of the game for a cannabis brand is real estate, and then you monetize from there, especially on a tight budget. A lot of brands, since there's no transaction on their site, never lean into their digital presence from a website, search, and email marketing perspective. That trained future brands to follow the same path — try to go viral on Instagram, do pop-ups, and so on. But even if you go viral, why wouldn't you want those people to sign up for your email list so you can tell them when products are dropping at the dispensaries where the transaction actually happens? It's a mentality brands got into because they couldn't monetize their sites directly, and I think that needs to change, because we're now using websites to capture leads through email marketing and also track traffic to store locators. You can see which brands are getting the most traffic to those 'shop now' buttons, correlate that with in-store sales data, and see which dispensaries you should invest more in as a brand. If most of your margin comes from five dispensaries, put your flag in the ground there, increase those margins, then move to the next five, then the next five. That's how you monetize as a brand and track it all. When you do pop-ups in store, you collect emails and communicate with those people. We're using tools like Alpine IQ, for example, so a brand can co-market with a retailer and track the performance of that campaign. On the site side, we use APIs with companies like Headset and Lit Alerts to customize store locators and track that data. There's some really cool stuff we're about to launch with some of these companies in Q2 that will be first-of-a-kind in the industry for monetizing for brands — that monetization is going to feel almost as real as a normal DTC transaction soon. Bryan Fields: Going further on that — I think people sometimes get lost in the process of understanding data analytics and attributing marketing efforts, putting the puzzle together to say 'this effort drove these results, this is what we want to double down on.' Just having that clarity makes the process so much easier. For people out there with a brand who are unsure where they stand, they should prioritize that over anything else — stop spending money and say, 'I need to understand what works and what doesn't. I need one success metric: if we spend $10,000 here, what would make this successful?' Track it, and if it worked, continue; if it didn't, learn from it and adjust. John Shute: Exactly. It's a harder process, but it's way more effective and makes life easier long term. For brands, it's interesting from a brand-retailer perspective — sometimes you're confused, like, 'I didn't realize this store is getting so many clicks from our store locator, but it's not actually a big sales store for us.' That means the customer in that area is interested in your product, so now you can go to that dispensary and say, 'I think we should do a campaign together, you should order more inventory, because we just saw this data on our site.' Vice versa, your highest-performing in-store location might not be performing well online — that tells you where you need to fix monetization and get those people into your funnel. Pick five or ten stores to start with that are strong both online and in-store, use that formula, and keep working through the list. That's what I'm excited about with these Q2 launches — the goal is to make everything online completely trackable for brands, and we're pretty much there. Bryan Fields: Can you tease any information on that? John Shute: I've got to be careful — I shared too much in a LinkedIn post once and got a talking-to, so I'll keep this one just between us. But going back to the store-locator example — one thing I'd do is have a rep show up at that store to see what's going on. Maybe do a vendor day, watch what's happening in store, do some bud tender education. But sometimes it's also about how the store is presenting your brand — you didn't have visibility into it. Like, 'we only make two grand a month at this store, but the shop-now and store locator for that store are getting a thousand clicks a month — that doesn't make sense.' Then you go to that retailer's site and notice your brand is buried, and you go into the store and see you're in some weird spot on the shelf. Now you have ammo to go to them and say, 'We're getting a thousand clicks to your site from this store — you could be making more money off our brand, and here's how.' You use that same formula to fix other retailers. It's like playing offense in a sport — understanding the situation in play, what you can teach people, what information you can share. That's where information becomes really valuable, but you have to understand what you're doing. Trackability is great, but if you don't define a single metric of success, data can get messy and noisy. Bryan Fields: Yeah, totally — you can easily overthink it all. John Shute: There's a lot going on when you're launching a brand or running a company. One of the best tools is really leaning into segmenting audiences. When someone signs up for your email, where are they located, and what product are they buying? You can segment by location and by product preference, so you're not overwhelming people with irrelevant communication. Some brands we work with have live rosin vapes but also cheap distillate gummies — the customer who wants a $10 gummy doesn't want to hear about the live rosin vape drop. Overcommunicating puts your brand at risk of losing that customer's interest. We do this for retailers, but now we're doing it for brands too, because brands have different product categories that each need different communication, and brands in multiple states have different vibes, engagement, and SKUs per state. You don't want to send the Massachusetts customer a New Jersey live rosin vape drop — they'll just unsubscribe. Email marketing is the first step, but data analysis and segmentation is the next, because there's a lot of risk in the wrong communication. Bryan Fields: Yeah, I'm someone who — the first time is okay, but the second time I get sent a product I'm definitely not interested in, I unsubscribe. It's frustrating, one, because I never purchased that product, so you shouldn't be pushing me on it, and two, if you don't have the right formula for understanding your users, don't push a specific product. I'd rather a brand not push products and instead do something like, 'fill out this information and get 25% off' — some technique that says, 'we don't know enough about you to feel comfortable sending you marketing, so we'll send you a trade: fill this out, we'll send you a discount.' I come into the store, they learn more about me, everybody wins — because they're not optimizing for my first or second purchase, they're optimizing for my eighth, ninth, and tenth, where I become a consistent part of my buying routine, buying this brand at this store on a regular interval. There are so many dispensaries near me on Long Island, and I go to one — because that one feels like it knows me. It'd be really difficult for someone to pull me away from that. John Shute: A thousand percent. It's easy for people to get lost in the sauce of where to spend their money and time. If it were me, I'd lean into monetization on the email side, because so many people are focused on getting someone through the door the first time — who cares if they buy once and never again? Think about how much time and money you just wasted acquiring that customer versus retaining and communicating with them the right way. That's the biggest gap I see on the retail and brand side — everyone wants a huge ad budget to get people through the door, but how are you getting those customers back? On the retail side, the data shows roughly 60 to 70% of customers don't come back after the first visit. It goes down a bit after the second and third visit, but you tend to lose them again by around the fourth. So the goal, starting with the branding process, should be: how do you get someone through the door so they never think about going anywhere else again — for both retailer and brand? If you're not thinking that way, you'll have a hole in the bottom of the ship the entire time you're running your business. So many people come to us with a great site, great branding, great e-commerce, and a big ad budget, but once someone comes in, all they do is send one email a month with no segmentation or analysis of retention. Lifetime customer value is really the way you have to be thinking — during the branding process, all the way through: what's the packaging, what's the site going to look like, how does the brand look in an email, an SMS, a social post. It's not just visual — it's the tagline, the mission, the vision, how you formally engage with the community. Those little things make all the difference, because eventually you'll have a huge number of brands or retailers in your area, and only a few will win that game. Bryan Fields: Unfortunately this industry is really tough in the beginning. John Shute: I've gone through the licensing process myself, and we've gone through it with a ton of large and small operators — getting approved, getting permits, delaying the launch, and you lose sight of the future because of all the BS you have to deal with on the front end. I've seen large and small operators make that mistake. Fortunately, larger operators have bigger pockets to pay for and fix the mistakes, but for smaller operators, it really hurts to make those investments early on. My big advice is to put more into your pro forma for branding, marketing, and performance, because it becomes your lifeline no matter how you look at it. Bryan Fields: Right now there's a lot of disparity, and it can be used as a competitive advantage, but as the floor rises and markets mature, it gets tighter and everyone's expected to perform at a certain level. One suggestion is to play the other side — pretend you're a consumer, go to your own website, and ask what feels like friction. If I'm going to buy something, do I know exactly what I'm buying? Jot down every feeling of friction. Sometimes we forget to look at our own business from the other side of the fence. It takes five or ten minutes once or twice a month, and it doesn't require a marketing background — just take over your own website and ask what it feels like. John Shute: Yeah, sometimes the first thing you try on your own site, you're like, 'wow, this is already wrong.' On another flip side of all this — one thing that really disappoints me is product quality. You can have the coolest brand, everything thought out perfectly, but if your product sucks, you'll only get so far, and even if you do well for a while, someone will come in with a better product and a competitive brand and win. The consumer needs to be at the heart of everything — product quality, online experience, in-store experience, packaging, follow-up communication. At the end of the day we're trying to help people live better lives, and if the product isn't safe, there's no point in any of this. There's not enough conversation in this industry about consumer safety and product quality — how the plant's grown, how it's manufactured, how a vape combusts and goes into your lungs. Those conversations don't happen enough; it's more arguments about marketing tactics and retail experience. Bryan Fields: It's a delicate balance between channels and understanding what messaging needs to be out there — and also, does the consumer really care? I always ask people, 'when you bought a product, why did you buy that one?' They'll say the branding was cool, they liked the packaging, the bud tender recommended it, or the price was right. That shows how early we still are as an industry — decisions made on 'it's pretty' or 'the bud tender told me to.' But those things change over time, so from a marketing standpoint, are we attracting the right customers, and do we even know who the right customers are? A lot of brands have endless SKUs across every category, which can work, but it's harder. If you narrow down — 'we're going to make the best live resin gummies in the state' — that's your focus, your channel, and that's where you double down. I think niching down is a cheat code going forward; too many teams spread themselves thin. John Shute: My favorite is when brands start small and grow based on consumer feedback. Taste Buds out here in Colorado, for example — they were doing live rosin gummies for a while, all about the edible, and then through polling and consumer feedback they found people wanted their concentrates as concentrates, because they were actually really good. So they launched a vape brand based on what their consumers wanted. Start small, achieve an ROI, learn the lessons, and if you're going to grow your SKUs, grow them smart, based on polls you run at events and online. That's cool because then you can plan the launch and think about who the target consumer is now. One thing I've noticed over the years is that ego gets in the way of marketing and business — I've fallen victim to this myself, everyone does. It's frustrating when a brand launches with twenty SKUs because they want to be the best and biggest — do you have enough money to sustain that? Usually not. Same thing on social — great tool, don't get me wrong, but at different points in a business's life cycle you have to put certain amounts of effort into it based on KPIs and goals. Some brands pour everything into Instagram — did it move the needle, did you get into more dispensaries, did sales pick up? Sometimes there are glitches in the system — brands that have lived off social media forever, celebrity-endorsed, but those are glitches; there are way more non-glitches than glitches. If you have a great brand, packaging, product, and sales strategy, you get into dispensaries, and then you can start monetizing tools like Instagram. I always encourage people to do the ego gut-check — maybe do an ayahuasca trip before you launch something to ego-death yourself, or just throw it into ChatGPT and say, 'play devil's advocate on this concept.' Bryan Fields: I wonder too — do you think teams would benefit from starting over, auditing their entire marketing perspective from scratch? Say it's January 2026, list out everywhere people find you, how you approach them once they do, and build through the systems to see if there's a gap — maybe you hired a social media person but you're not actually ready for social yet, maybe what you need first is the website and SEO. Do you think teams would benefit from connecting that entire life cycle together? John Shute: Yeah — with algorithms and AI working the way they are across the board, there's no better time than now to rip the band-aid off and fix it. The longer you wait to fix your searchability problem, the deeper the hole gets, and the further ahead the people doing it right get. When we work with clients launching in a new market, we ask: how do we make it as hard as possible for the next five guys who open within ten miles to outrank you on the terms driving your traffic? That's why you build a strong site, great brand, strong SEO, and retention dialed in from the start — because if Cookies opens down the street, people are going to go check them out no matter what you say. But will your next email get them back? Will they trust you enough to come back? We're seeing organic search be, on average, the largest traffic driver for a lot of these sites now, for both retail and brands — so lean into that and don't let anyone beat you there. That's what I mean by ripping the band-aid off — closing the gap on people ahead of you, or creating a gap yourself. We're spending a ton of time right now auditing brands, packaging, sites, SEO, and retention strategy, because what's the point of spending fifty grand on ad spend if your brand looks bad, there's no email capture, and no way to retain that traffic? You just wasted fifty thousand dollars. I actually backpedal on selling people services sometimes because I don't want to have the conversation later where they question what they spent money on — those conversations are the bane of my existence. A lot of what I try to do is reduce how often those conversations happen, because a big ad budget doesn't matter if the right systems aren't in place. Bryan Fields: And I think about those teams — marketing gets lumped onto one or two people, but what we've described is five or six full-time, independent roles. That's not fair to put on a single marketing director's shoulders. John Shute: Right, and a lot of business owners don't understand that. We had a client we were killing it for — every dollar invested had a proven ROI, tracked with last-click, single-day attribution tied directly to their POS and GA4, not a vague programmatic or social spend. They decided to bring it in-house, even though we had ten to fifteen people touching their account each month versus the two they'd be replacing us with. When you lay that out, they start to realize maybe something else is going on — usually it's a money thing, the owner saw the invoice and wanted to cut the expense, when the real reason they're feeling that pressure is they're losing money elsewhere, like not managing inventory correctly. It gets uncomfortable, because if marketing is driving the business and you turn off the faucet, the business might coast for a bit before it comes to a screeching halt. I wonder why marketing is always the first thing cut — 'we spent seventy-five grand last year, we're cutting 40% off the top, do the best you can.' Bryan Fields: Well, I'd say most of the time it's because people don't realize how legitimate the attribution actually is for what they're paying for. And a lot of the people making those decisions come from an old-school marketing background where things weren't as trackable — the print-ad days — where you could cut it and it wouldn't visibly impact the top line because it was never attributed to revenue in the first place. John Shute: Right, and when we come in and say, 'no, this is literally the majority of your business, and here's why it's trackable' — unless your entire POS system is wrong on every transaction — people just don't realize that, because they've wasted a lot of money over the years on things that weren't legitimate. Bryan Fields: That's where analytics and defining success metrics are so important, and I think the way your team defines that makes it clear and visible for owners. I think the question owners should ask before cutting a budget is: 'John, if we doubled our budget with you, what results should we expect?' Rather than assuming, ask the reverse question first. John Shute: What's crazy is that in some cases we can actually predict financial projections, and for the rest of our services that aren't quite as dollar-predictable, you can still audit and assess where you stand and make an informed decision. I wish people would ask more questions like that, or take the time to actually look at their performance. We send tracking reports, Loom videos walking through everything, and most months most clients don't even look at them — which is sad, because what we're working on is one of the most critical parts of their business, and they don't realize it. Bryan Fields: So you think it's mostly an ownership issue? John Shute: I think it's a capacity thing too — a lot of the people we work with are burned out; this industry is such a grind. So when we come back and say, 'we should really go through this and make sure it's the right decision,' people often backpedal once you really break it down with them — not every time, but often, especially this time of year, Q1, 'new year new me, let's cut budget, bring it in-house.' When you really get into it and ask what their concerns are, a lot of times they'll rescope rather than leave. We've actually had people come back after leaving over the past couple of years, which is really cool, because they didn't see the same results — and that says a lot. Marketing is unique because trends and algorithms constantly change, and you need a good grasp of all the interconnected tools as well as the visibility to know which part of the chain isn't working. With one or two people, that's really difficult to do. Bryan Fields: Especially retention — it's constant communication, design, and thought process every day, on top of website updates, content, media outreach, social media, event graphics, in-store signups. It's a never-ending funnel, and doing it right is way more valuable than taking a chance doing it yourself, especially when you can attribute real numbers — if we spend a dollar, our return is five dollars, and if we put in ten, do we get fifty? Is it a constant multiple you can rely on? Every dollar can be attributed to a process — awareness, driving traffic, that's fair too, maybe not valued the same as someone who clicked through and bought, but you should have a mixture of marketing efforts qualified and quantified against your budget for the year. John Shute: Passive resistance to success is the route I try to take with everyone, and sometimes that leads to tough conversations — like when we were auditing a site and SEO, and our creative director looked at the client's packaging and pointed out issues. I just got a deposit for a website project where the client didn't have budget for a rebrand, but my business partner noted in the SEO audit that their highest-margin in-house brand was using AI art to differentiate SKUs, which was an immediate turnoff and looked cheap. Now we're auditing the branding and packaging and backpedaling on the website. You have to have those tough conversations, and not every relationship works out — it really is a relationship, you need vibe to build a good brand together. We have an issue right now with a client whose site isn't loading for about 5% of mobile users, and we can't figure out why — we've talked to the hosting provider, Cloudflare, everyone's pointing fingers, everything scans clean, and it turns out it might be an ISP issue with Spectrum or Comcast flagging the site for no clear reason. The client doesn't fully understand it's not us, but they've seen the effort we've put in, comparing this site to others we host that are set up identically, and that builds trust even in a frustrating situation. That's a client who actually left and came back, and I respect them for being honest about how they felt and staying open to understanding the situation. Bryan Fields: Ultimately you're aligned on the goal — the more successful they are, the more successful you are. And when problems come up, which is expected, especially in cannabis, you keep to the process. We deal with the same thing on YouTube — a big spike in views, then they fall off a cliff for no clear reason. Do I want to figure out why? Sure. Will I ever fully get to the bottom of it? No. You just keep the process moving and accept that algorithms change. John Shute: Yeah, man, it's crazy. We've had a program where we help people get out of being shadowbanned on social and then help them build a strategy to execute on their own, because that's a bigger value-add than charging a ton of money to run someone's social when they don't have the budget for it or could spend it better elsewhere. Some people are in a spot where we say, 'you do need us on social, but until you're out of shadowban, have a compliant strategy, and a solid budget, I'm not going to push that on you.' Bryan Fields: No, it's a dark hole otherwise. Last question — what question do you wish more people asked you? John Shute: I'd say how to get involved with our giveback programs. A lot of people in the industry, clients, even friends, don't ask to jump on board with what we've set up. We're proud that through organizations we've found over the past nine years, and a lot of events and campaigns, we've helped raise over $12 million for nonprofits and community organizations around the world. This past fall we launched our own initiative for the first time, called Puff Creative Cares. We did our first campaign with a recovery clinic here in Colorado, raising $5,000 for their opening — I brought my kids to the opening party, it was like a day-sober rave, it was awesome. We also did events in Vegas this past year and raised $10,000 for Freedom Grow, to help get cannabis prisoners out of prison. In the new year — well, a little late now — right before Q2 we're launching a full year of a mental health campaign, because everything feels pretty wild right now, and we want people to prioritize mental health and spread awareness. The one thing I wish people asked me more is how they can get involved to see the change they want to see in the world, because I hate that feeling of helplessness — like you can't do anything, or don't have the time. We're trying to create a platform for people to get involved without having to spend a ton of money or time. Bryan Fields: John, you're killing it, dude. I really appreciate everything you're doing, and I think the world is a better place for it. For our listeners who want to get in touch, learn more about your giveback program, or get marketing help, where can they find you? John Shute: Our website, puffcreative.com, is a good spot — we'll have a whole page dedicated to the Puff Creative Cares programs with updates. I'm on LinkedIn too, pretty active, so don't be a stranger there, and also pretty active on Instagram personally. All the contact forms on the Puff Creative site pretty much lead back to me anyway, so any of those places work. Bryan Fields: Thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. John Shute: Yeah, thanks, Brian.