Cannabis Brands Urged To Study Consumer Habits Like Wine And Tobacco Giants Do

Wine’s Lesson On Motivation

In the mid-2000s, Constellation Wines U.S. surveyed 3,500 premium wine consumers for a study it called Project Genome. It concluded that “there is no typical wine consumer.”

Drinkers fell into six segments defined by motivation rather than demographics: Enthusiast, Image Seeker, Savvy Shopper, Traditionalist, Satisfied Sipper, and Overwhelmed.

The largest group, at 23% of respondents, was the Overwhelmed, people who “find shopping for wine complex and worry about making a mistake.”

When Constellation repeated the study a decade later with roughly 7,000 consumers, the segments had changed, but the Overwhelmed still made up 19%.

The cannabis lesson is direct, according to the report. A menu built for the most engaged shopper can quietly lose the one who is afraid of choosing wrong, and that shopper may be a large share of the room.

Operators can start segmenting by motivation with one optional question at loyalty sign-up or checkout, such as what the customer is shopping for today. Sales data alone cannot produce that segmentation.

Packaged Goods And Tobacco Track Over Time

NielsenIQ’s consumer panel, as described by the Kilts Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has 40,000 to 60,000 U.S. households that use in-home scanners to record their purchases from any outlet.

Because the same households report over time, analysts can see trial, repeat purchase, and switching directly instead of inferring them.

A cannabis loyalty program sees one customer at one retailer, but it can still answer the most important question. Operators should measure repeat at the product level, not just the visit level.

Of the customers who bought a product for the first time last quarter, how many bought it again? A product that sells well but rarely repeats is a merchandising problem hiding inside a good sales number.

The Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study, a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration that started in 2013, follows about 49,000 people ages 12 and older, contacting each once a year or every other year.

Following the same people is what lets researchers see how individual habits change. Cannabis has serious consumer research too, including the International Cannabis Policy Study, led by professor David Hammond at the University of Waterloo, which has surveyed consumers in Canada and the United States every year since 2018.

Shared Research And Next Steps

Wine Market Council, a nonprofit funded by member companies across the wine industry, started in 1996 because industry leaders realized they needed more data to understand U.S. wine consumers.

Its history notes that this mattered most to small family wine businesses without the resources for an in-house research department. Its benchmark segmentation study has run since 1997.

Independent cannabis operators face the same problem at a smaller scale. State trade associations could commission anonymized, pre-competitive consumer research the way wine’s member companies do.

That way, a single-store operator gets the kind of segmentation only large brands can afford on their own.

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