Branding rules: Vic Mensa shares marketing insights at MJBizCon

Vic Mensa did the reading.The Chicago-born-and-bred musician and entrepreneur did most everything successful executives do before he launched the Second City’s first Black-owned cannabis brand, 93 Boyz.

ADVERTISEMENT Where did the name 93 Boyz come from? Mensa and his partner were born in 1993, so they are the 93 Boyz.He did the product and market research, and he enacted a successful pre-legalization strategy.

(Or, put another way: As a teenager on the South Side, he took two trains across the city to access the best flower he could find before taking it back to the neighborhood to sell.) But before his foray into the legal cannabis industry with 93 Boyz – a bid to build off the celebrity and success earned in a music career that’s seen him record with Roc Nation before his first independent release earlier this summer – he sat down to carefully prepare and applied knowledge from books.“I’d seen the ways the right book at the right time can radically transform an experience,” he told MJBizDaily recently.

“I’ve seen friends of mine manifest their way out of incarceration using the principles in some of these books.” He knew he had a story to sell: a South Side kid who hustled in the streets and struck cultural gold in the recording studio.But through careful reading of “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” by Al Ries and Laura Ries, he knew brands need stories, too – a coherent narrative that customers sign onto with every purchase.

And in “Building a Story Brand 2.0,” by Donald Miller, he knew if that story isn’t clearly told, in the packaging and marketing and even the color scheme, the effort will fall short, no matter how well funded or set up – and no matter how strong the cultural connection between music and a product like cannabis might be.“These are the foundational truths of branding and creating something that stands out: something that has a clear narrative a...

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Publisher: Marijuana Business Daily

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