5 Strategies to Improve Speed to Market

Improving your speed to market is critical for success in today’s fast-paced business environment. Bringing products and services to market quickly allows businesses to capitalize on emerging opportunities, gain a competitive advantage, and stay ahead of the curve.

When we speak with cannabis brands, lead times are constant sources of bottlenecks within the business operation. Getting design and ideas ready to pre-press become huge efforts because of the level of orchestration and lack of collaborative tools between cannabis brands and their stakeholders.

This holds up product launches, delayed revenue, and can erode your brand’s reputation over time with both retailer partners and the general market.

Creating a clear and workable strategy, eliminating bottlenecks in the supply chain, and ensuring compliance will all contribute to making your cannabis brand nimble and ready to respond to customer demand. Pairing these steps with agile packaging solutions will keep your brand on the cutting edge of this burgeoning industry.

1. Create a Clear Market Strategy

Implementing a clear market strategy is fundamental for increasing speed to market as it promotes focused, data-driven decision-making and efficient resource allocation. These factors allow cannabis brands to focus on what's most important: developing a fire product and getting it onto shelves and into people's homes as quickly as possible.

Your brand's market strategy should focus on how you can feed into market trends and give customers new, innovative, and on-point products within a minimal timeframe. This will require constant market research and a commitment to staying ahead of the curve. Knowing what the market demands is a powerful tool, but creating the demand is a boss move that will put your brand on the map.

Your market strategy will require agile project management in the form of:

Focused and Accelerated Development

Implement a well-defined market strategy that provides clear direction for your product development process. This will take customer needs, the competitive landscape, and market trends into account. 

Development teams can then prioritize features that address key market demands and avoid wasting time on irrelevant features. This focused approach streamlines the development process and accelerates time-to-market.

Efficient Resource Allocation

A clear market strategy helps allocate your most valuable resources effectively. Use insights gained through market research to understand the target market and competitive landscape. This approach prevents wasted effort and ensures resources are used efficiently to achieve the fastest possible market entry.

Reduced Risk

A thorough market analysis helps identify potential risks and challenges early on. This allows businesses to develop mitigation strategies and adjust their approach accordingly, reducing the likelihood of costly delays and ensuring a smoother and faster market entry. Depending on the state you operate in, you can leverage tools like Lit Alerts to find market level data and longitudinal trends that can help you get ahead of the market with your yields.

Improved Go-to-Market Strategy Execution

A well-defined market strategy provides a roadmap for go-to-market activities that your digital marketing, customer service, and sales teams can implement. This ensures that all aspects of the launch are coordinated and executed efficiently, accelerating market penetration and maximizing impact.

Data-Driven Decision Making

A strong market strategy relies on data and insights to inform every decision. Using a data-driven approach allows businesses to make informed decisions quickly and adapt to changing market conditions, further accelerating time-to-market and increasing the likelihood of success. 

2. Implement Agile Packaging Solutions

Agile packaging solutions prevent your packaging from becoming a stumbling block when launching new products or keeping your most popular items in stock. 

Problems start to arise when you've created a strong cultivation process to maximize your yield but are held back by delays in packaging supply. ‘

This is common in cannabis, as sometimes the packaging you will need can be determined by the yield of the plant itself. Depending on the yield and how brands choose to cultivate, you could find yourself needing different types of packaging form factor quickly because you need to create more distillate or more pre-rolls than you originally were planning for.

This problem is a particular concern for companies in the cannabis industry that are overreliant on overseas packaging. 

The good news is that this frustrating problem has a clear solution. Trusting your packaging needs to a specialist cannabis packaging supplier eliminates bottlenecks by providing a domestic packaging platform that removes the stress of overseas production queues or uncontrollable shipping delays. This means your packaging requirements are fulfilled in days, not weeks or months.

A reliable domestic packaging supply chain allows you to improve your speed to market because your packaging is ready whenever you are. This helps you stay ahead of your competition, keep your customers engaged, and guarantee consistent product availability. 

3. Ensure Compliance with State and Federal Regulations

Compliance with state and federal regulations surrounding the contents and packaging of your cannabis products is fundamental in optimizing speed to market. This is because non-compliance can lead to fines, license suspensions and revocations, product recalls, and even civil or criminal penalties.

Your packaging supplier plays a crucial role in helping you stay compliant while producing aesthetically appealing and memorable packaging that aligns with the brand vision. Ensure you work with packaging experts specialized in the cannabis industry who understand the ins and outs of federally mandated regulations for packaging and labeling plus those relevant in each state. This is critical to staying compliant as state regulations vary considerably. 

The following are among the differences in state packaging and labeling requirements for cannabis:

Type of Information	Proportion of States (%)
THC Content and Manufacturer Contact	100
Batch Number, Health Risks, and Production Tracking	94
Cannabis Symbol	90
CBD Content and Children Disclaimer	87
Impairment Disclaimer	84
Expiration Date	74
Net Weight and Cannabinoid Content	68
Potency Statement	52
Storage Recommendations	48
THC per Serving and Food Allergens	45
Usage Instructions	42
Content Restrictions	35
CBD per Serving	29
Font Size	23
Age Requirement	10
Color Requirement	3

Source

Find the Right Balance Between Compliance and Aesthetics

The impact your packaging design has on your marketability and appeal should never be underestimated. Research has shown that cannabis packaging design regulations that restrict colors and brand imagery decrease the product's appeal and positive associations (page 1 of the PDF). 

Furthermore, the color used on cannabis packaging also impacts the perception of its effects. For example, consumers perceive products in white packages to be milder and have lower health risks (page 6 of the PDF). These two perceptions contribute to higher ratings of appeal.

This type of information is useful for brands that understand their target audience and what they're looking for. While safer, less potent products may benefit from white packaging, premium brands that offer varied levels of cannabis flower or concentrate potency and experience will benefit from expert help designing impactful packaging within the confines of compliance regulations.

4. Create a Minimum Viable Product

Creating a minimum viable product (MVP) significantly improves speed to market by gaining the early market validation (or criticism) your product needs. Early customer feedback helps identify critical issues, gather valuable insights into user needs and preferences, and allows for quick adjustments before investing heavily in full-scale development.

These sorts of limited runs to determine market appetite are ideal instances to experiment with your supply chain and test whether you can gain a more efficient or less hassled experience from nimble suppliers.

This step also helps inventory management as the costs and logistics of ordering and storing excessive product that doesn't hit the right note with your customers is damaging for small or emerging cannabis brands that require quick turnover of their perishable products.

Creating an MVP also gives brands an invaluable chance to try out different packaging options. For example, cannabis brands that offer a premium product will benefit from offering premium packaging options like POP VAC jars for flower and concentrate. It's also a great chance to explore premium packaging embellishment capabilities like holo treatments, gloss finish, or foil lettering.

A 2022 study into the impact of creative packaging on customer motivation to process brand messaging found that many brands will benefit from applying an optimal level of creativity to their packaging. Creative packaging heightens interest due to its originality and also for its ability to stimulate curiosity. 

The study concluded that although creativity is important for successful packaging, packaging design must convey meaningfulness and personal relevance to the customer (4.2). Get expert guidance through the design process to maximize the impact of your packaging.

5. Eliminate Bottlenecks in the Supply Chain

Eliminating supply chain bottlenecks is crucial for improving speed to market. It's especially important for cannabis brands to take proactive steps to remove weaknesses in their supply chain. This is because delivering the highest quality and most potent and aromatic product is only possible by getting your products onto dispensary shelves quickly and getting the most return from your yield based on how it matures.

Supply chain bottlenecks are any issue that disrupts the smooth flow of production. This includes processing the plant, the manufacturing processes, packaging, shipping, and logistics. All of these play a role in the supply chain for you, with packaging and logistics being parts of the supply chain you likely are most externally dependent on.

Eliminating these disruptions means you ensure a consistent and efficient production process, minimize delays, and accelerate the overall time-to-market. 

A supply chain that is free from bottlenecks is more agile and responsive to market changes. This allows businesses to quickly adapt to changing demand, introduce new products, and respond to competitive pressures.

Choose Agile and Responsive Packaging Suppliers

Choosing agile packaging solutions is a crucial part of eliminating bottlenecks and achieving faster speed to market. However, cannabis brands often have to deal with unreliable packaging vendors that lack the expertise to offer an agile and responsive service when mistakes occur or the brand's needs suddenly change. 

This problem is solved by working with a highly diversified packaging vendor that can offer quick and effective solutions when you need them.

Always choose packaging companies that prioritize transparency and timely and clear communication. Remember that time is of the essence for cannabis producers whose product has a limited shelf life, making synchronicity with their packaging supplier paramount to the viability and profitability of their business.

Maintain Your Competitive Edge with a Fast Speed to Market

Optimizing speed to market empowers cannabis brands to guarantee customers the freshest products and maintain customer satisfaction and loyalty. Fast, efficient, and professional operations are the key to staying ahead of the curve in this ultra-competitive market where speed is everything.

Choosing the most efficient solutions along every step of the supply chain is the best way to improve your speed-to-market strategy. Brands that make agile logistical, packaging, and shipping choices will invariably offer their customers fast service without compromising on quality.