Cannabis industry professionals want to understand which products, marketing strategies, and branding will beckon target demographics to their products. A recent Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) data brief entitled Differences in Past Year Modes of Marijuana Use among People Aged 12 or older shows a group that may be woefully underserved.
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The brief comes thanks to Key Substance Use and Mental Health Indicators in the United States, published in July 2024. It takes a look at the information from a new perspective. The final data sample contained 67,000 completed interviews that covered cannabis use but focused more on race and ethnicity than age demographics. The recently published brief broke it down and showed that senior women might need more.
The report shares lots of interesting tidbits, like the fact that women are more apt to try drinks and edibles, while men seem to smoke more. It also revealed a potentially uncaptured consumer.
Senior women were not prominent in the SAMHSA brief. In each data set presented in the paper, senior women were the least interested in flower, concentrates, vapes, and edibles among all those surveyed.
This group was most interested in the least purchased categories: topicals and sublingual edible products. Senior women make up a small portion of cannabis consumers who answered this poll, but that may not mean they are not interested in weed.
Older women find relief with cannabis, but this data potentially indicates a few things about the group. They seek out medicinal products more than anyone else and do not tend to explore flower, concentrates, or vapes. Even edibles were low on the priority list.
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For a group that popularized wine decor and puns, senior women may have the potential to enjoy mind-altering weed products. However, according to this data, they haven’t found their way in. Companies wanting to capture a larger market share may shift focus to women aged 65 and up. This group of retirees has not ventured into the worlds of inhalable or edible cannabis, according to this brief, but maybe they’d like to.
Based on these results, it seems senior women have yet to find an entry point into the most purchased cannabis categories. It would be wise to figure out what has stopped the demo from exploring sooner and then fixing that issue to bolster weed sales and expand access to new demographics.
