Most cannabis companies have a brand deck. Beautiful fonts. Clean color palette. Mission statement that took six Zoom calls and two near-divorces to finalize. While that’s adorable, none of that is really your brand. Your brand is what shows up when someone Googles you at 11:47 PM before wiring money, signing a deal, stocking your product, or deciding whether you’re worth talking to. That’s the real brand.
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Oh, and no, you don’t get to declare yourself a “thought leader” either. Frankly, when people call themselves that, it usually has the same energy as giving yourself your own nickname. If it’s real, other people decide it for you.
Same goes for branding. You don’t decide what your company is known for. Sure, you have influence over it, but the public record actually decides.
The Problem Most Cannabis Companies Never Notice
A company internally decides it’s a premium brand based on its deck and website, but then a journalist covers the company for the first time. The story frames them as a scrappy operator trying to survive a brutal market.
Here’s how this typically unfolds:
First off, the journalist probably isn’t wrong, and it’s not even bad press. That being said, now that framing exists in a credible publication with a timestamp attached to it. The next reporter sees it, the investor running diligence sees it, and the retailer preparing for the meeting sees it.
Chances are, nobody’s reading your brand deck first. They’re seeing that coverage first, and if the coverage tells a different story than the internal narrative, congratulations, you now have two brands positioned differently. This is a common occurrence when brands and businesses think they need coverage for the sake of coverage and disregard the importance of positioning.
Why Posting More Content Usually Makes This Worse
When companies realize the external narrative doesn’t match the internal one, they panic and start producing more content. All of a sudden, the founder or marketing director orders more LinkedIn posts, more “vision”, more carefully crafted statements about innovation, authenticity, and community. Meanwhile, the audience is reading it with the exact level of skepticism it deserves because one narrative doesn’t match the other.
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Everyone knows company-produced content is self-serving. That doesn’t make it useless, but it does make it fundamentally different from earned media. Earned media carries weight because the company didn’t write it. That distinction matters more than most founders want to admit. A single misaligned article in a credible outlet can quietly undo six months of self-promotional content.
As mentioned earlier, this doesn’t necessarily have to do with an article being negative, but more so because it was believable.
Founders Think They Control the Narrative More Than They Do
One of the most dangerous phrases in business is: “We know who we are.”
Cool. Does anybody else?
Because investors, journalists, retailers, regulators, and consumers are all building perceptions based on the public record, not your internal confidence. Big difference!
That record gets indexed, archived, quoted, referenced, fed into AI systems, pulled into diligence reports, and becomes a part of infrastructure. Once a narrative calcifies publicly, changing it gets complicated and expensive.
Sometimes the gap is subtle. The company sees itself as authoritative.
The media frames it as “up-and-coming.” The company thinks it’s category-defining. The coverage treats it as another operator in the mix.
The Most Important Brand Audit Most Companies Never Do
Forget the deck for a second. Read your coverage the way a skeptical outsider would and ask yourself:
- What words keep showing up?
- What themes get repeated?
- What does the company consistently get associated with?
- What gets ignored completely?
Most operators never do this honestly because they’re too busy counting mentions instead of analyzing framing.
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It’s important to note that coverage volume is not the same thing as narrative control. You can dominate headlines and still lose positioning. In some cases, the real story exists, but nobody ever translated it into something journalists could actually use. The insight stayed trapped inside internal meetings and investor decks. In other cases, the media narrative is accurate, and the internal branding is aspirational fiction.
Both happen constantly, both are fixable, but neither gets solved by another rebrand.
The Reality Nobody Likes Hearing
Your brand is not your logo, your tagline, nor is it the “About Us” section your team rewrites every six months. Your brand is the accumulated public record of how credible third parties describe you when you’re not in the room. That record is being built right now, whether you’re paying attention to it or not.
Category creators and leaders are the ones who understand this and take full responsibility for making sure the market truly understands who they are, what they do, and why they do it.
*This article was submitted by an unpaid guest contributor. The opinions or statements within do not necessarily reflect those of GreenState or HNP. The author is solely responsible for the content.