Marijuana dispensary names all sound the same, and that’s a business problem

Marijuana dispensary names sort of blur together. In the San Francisco Bay Area, there’s a Cannabud Express, Cannabliss, Kanna, Cannabis Culture and Cannavine. It’s like they’re interconnected in the Cannaverse (a name of another dispensary).

It has been over 25 years since medical use was made legal in California — and around six for recreational use — and stores are still being named after cannabis. Where’s the originality? As more states legalize marijuana use, it feels like the industry still has some growing up to do to move away from stoner jokes and toward its expanding customer base.

Paul Earle Jr., a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, agrees that distinction is a problem for these businesses. “One of the primary jobs a brand has to do for a company is differentiate it … if every single cannabis company is trading off of the exact same tired tropes and cliches, their brands are failing their primary, singular, most important job of differentiation.”

To check if companies are distinguishing themselves, we analyzed every dispensary listing from WeedMaps, a map directory for local cannabis distributors. Here’s what patterns emerged when we examine the company’s name through a language model.

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When told about our project, David Hua, co-founder of Meadow a point of sale service for cannabis retailers, stopped me saying: “Can I guess the top words? You got green, canna-something, some cross and purple, you have got to have purple in there.” Meadow’s brand color is purple.

Hua was not far off, the top five most frequently appearing words were: Cannabis, green, wellness, company and health. When asked about the wellness or medical patterns observed in the data set, Hua says it speaks to cannabis retail’s origins in the space, legitimizing their existence to banks or investors. “When you see names like ‘med’ that’s a nod in the sense of where we all started: With medical [marijuana].”

A quiz about what science knows — and doesn’t know — about cannabis

When sorted by word most similar to cannabis, our list is over a hundred words deep of every pun and spelling (and misspellings) imaginable around the flower: cannabyss, cannarx, americanna, kannabuena, to name a few.

“It is not a joke,” says Earle Jr., “and if it is a joke, you’re limiting yourself … These are not gag gifts … this is not marginal stoner humor. If your goal is to remain really niche and not successful, then yes: Stoner humor.” To succeed, Earle Jr. recommends your business “be relevant, thoughtful, accessible, populist … or you’ll never get to be where you want to be.”

“We were selling ice in the desert,” says Emily Paxhia, co-founder of Poseidon, a cannabis investment fund, “but now it’s pretty competitive.” Paxhia says it comes down to “very fundamental brand building … it’s important to just have a very specific point of view and very clear target market segment.”

A notable brand, she points out, is one called Sunburn based out of Florida, where only medical use is legalized. The name comes from the father of their CEO, who was the target of a federal investigation into the smuggling of cannabis into the state in 1977, code named: “Operation Sunburn.” A quick stop to their website shows an embracing of this history as part of their identity.

“People love stories … and that’s a compelling one,” Earle Jr. said when I shared Sunburn with him.

“A bandit, troublemaker arc that is appealing to people. It’s very American, actually — finding ways to hack problems is quintessentially American capitalism.”

For JM Balbuena, co-founder of Prime Harvest cannabis company, her business is built on solving problems. When California opened up recreational use to those over 21 across the state in 2016, San Diego County restricted sales to only medically licensed retailers. That put her retailers in a bind. Balbuena adapted though, focusing the business on communicating the health benefits to her local community instead.

“There’s a certain mind-set and head space that you have to put yourself in, in order to see those challenges as puzzles,” says Balbuena, whose experiences translated into her book “The Successful Canna-Preneur.” For her, “you must see the opportunities in the challenges because there’s always something that might help you and help others then boom — now you’re in business.” These days, Balbuena does not want to limit her customer base built upon cliches: “I don’t think that’s the biggest portion of the market. Those people are catering to a certain demographic and I think that’s not the majority.”

As for whether the jokes in the industry will continue, Emily Paxhia says that while there are a lot of jokes about 420, it is a meaningful driver of sales. In 2022, stores on average saw 148 percent increase in sales on that day according to an analysis by Headset. “It’s why we call it the high holiday.”

About this story

Dispensary names from WeedMaps included all listings except doctor listings. Names were broken into words and filtered out for common stop words. In addition, words like LLC and Co. were removed. The fastText language classifier was used trained on a simplified word list from Wikipedia.

Steven Rich contributed to this report.