Tag Archives: info

Jane & Leafly Join Forces: An Interview with Socrates Rosenfeld, CEO of Jane

By Aaron Green
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As retailers accept the end of in-store shopping as we know it and start adjusting to e-commerce, an improved and more involved customer experience will be imperative for an e-retailer to grow, let alone stay afloat.

Jane recently announced a strategic partnership that combines Jane’s best-in-class product catalog and business tools with Leafly’s consumer marketplace and reach. Together, the companies will build solutions that empower cannabis retailers with fast and simple online shopping experiences that increase consumer purchase behavior. The partnership will seek to help instill consumer trust in the online shopping experience, build stronger customer acquisition tools for retailers, and help dispensaries grow their ecommerce capabilities with consistency and automation.

This strategic partnership comes after a massive year of growth for both Jane and Leafly. In the past year, Jane powered over 17 million orders and $2 billion in cannabis sales, while Leafly has seen more than 4,500 cannabis retailers in North America leverage their platform to bring new customers through the door.

Socrates Rosenfeld, CEO of Jane

We spoke with Socrates Rosenfeld, CEO of Jane to learn more about e-commerce and online marketplaces and how Jane and Leafly came together as partners, rather than competitors. Prior to Jane, Socrates was an Apache helicopter pilot for the US Army later transitioning to consulting with McKinsey.

Aaron Green: Socrates, thanks for taking the time today. What trends are you seeing and following in the industry?

Socrates Rosenfeld: Always happy to chat about the industry. Thanks for having me.

If you were to ask me that question a year ago, I’d say having a digital footprint was something that would give a dispensary or a brand a nice advantage. Today, it’s a must-have for survival. Where it used to be one or the other; online or offline, now we are able to merge the two by replicating a physical store into a digitized form to extend its reach far beyond its walls.

As things become more digitized, information becomes more necessary to run operations. With that we are able to meet the expectations of the consumers who are accustomed to convenience and curation. The omnichannel experience provides the best of both worlds. Access and ease of search with the ability to pick up or have the product delivered the same day from a locally owned and run business.

Reviews are one of the most important aspects of this unification of online and offline. It is something that is lost in solely offline purchases, that we’re now able to collect and organize. This product information allows us to provide customers the purchasing power to make a well-informed decision.

At Jane, we believe it is possible to create wins for the dispensaries, brands and customers – and digitization creates the opportunity for that to happen. I think there’s no better incubator in the world than the cannabis industry to prove that online and offline retail can work in harmony.

Aaron: Jane is the largest e-commerce platform in North American cannabis and Leafly is the largest marketplace in North American cannabis. What’s the difference between an e-commerce platform and a marketplace?

Socrates: Great question. There is definitely some overlap between the two, which is why it makes so much sense for us to collaborate. Ultimately though, our focus and expertise are different. Jane’s ecommerce platform serves as the industry’s digital infrastructure that pushes digital products across various order origination points like a dispensary’s own website, a brand’s own website and now, Leafly’s marketplace. Paired with Leafly’s industry-leading content and market information, together we can complete the entire online cannabis shopping experience – from product discovery through order fulfillment.

Aaron: At first glance, one might think that Jane and Leafly are competitors. How did you see it differently? And how did this partnership come about?

Socrates: Not only is our tech complementary, but we are aligned on mission – to empower consumers, dispensaries and brands with the integrity of the plant in mind.

We want to make it simple for consumers to reach the products that will be most helpful for them. We want to make it possible for dispensaries and brands, regardless of their size, to be able to compete on an even playing field.

It all comes back to being good stewards of the industry. Education and access create a healthy demand for a diverse range of products. That means that the plant stays in the hands of many – safeguarding it from homogenization.

Aaron: How do consumers benefit from the partnership?

Socrates: It really is all about bringing this industry in line with any other retail vertical and meeting the customer where they are. It unlocks more avenues for customers to discover products and access a vast catalog of information and verified customer reviews. Bottom line, this partnership makes shopping for cannabis as simple as shopping online for everything else in the world, while also ensuring the success of the sellers.

Aaron: When you say the sellers, are you talking about the dispensary or the brands?

Socrates: Both, we want to provide value for the entire ecosystem. We can do that directly for dispensaries and brands by enabling an automated ecommerce platform that they can use to power their own website. At Jane, we know that technology can unlock value for everyone, where it is not a zero-sum game and success for one means success for the other. With Jane, both the dispensaries and the brands win.

Aaron: What kind of regulatory challenges do you face through the partnership?

Socrates: There are no real regulatory challenges for the partnership itself. The entire industry operates under regulatory challenges, but it is those regulations that have been the catalyst for innovation. I see the opportunity for legal online payments and national product distribution to play a large role in shaping the industry soon, and a partnership like this will ensure a seamless transition for the industry as things continue to evolve.

Aaron: Final question. What are you personally interested in learning more about?

Socrates: I’ve always been curious about disruptive models. The companies, not just in tech, but any company that has set out to do things differently and has been able to hold true to a vision. That’s what interests me, and I think I will always have something to learn and draw inspiration from. 

Aaron: Excellent, that’s the end of the interview, Socrates!

Socrates: Thanks, Aaron.

Judge A Book By Its Cover: Why Understanding Information Economics is Critical to Gain Consumer Trust and Build a Sustainable Brand

By Nathan Libbey
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Information economics has existed for decades and drives much of how products, including cannabis, are marketed and purchased. One of the essential frameworks that guides information economics are the search, experience, and credence properties of a product (Patterson, 2017). Understanding these different product attributes is key to setting up a sustaining cannabis product, corporation, and industry.

Search

The search attribute of a product is largely what we see prior to the purchase of a product. Images, claims, and packaging may all contribute to the search attribute of a product. You’ve got a good-looking, flower, pre-roll or edible, and it shows well on your insta page. Information is seemingly symmetrical between agency and consumer, what you see is what you get. In the developing cannabis industry, firms are investing a tremendous amount of resources into search attributes.

Experience

What is the effect of the product? There are two aspects of the experience attribute in information economics. Testimonials may be also considered experience attributes, as they give a user knowledge of how a product tastes, how long it takes to kick in, how long it lasts and descriptions of how others perceived the product’s deliverables. Despite testimonial power, experience is largely personal and occurs only after the product is consumed. Information is seemingly symmetrical; you get the experience that the agency planned and you anticipated. Advances in genetics, homogeneous production methods and potency testing demonstrate that the cannabis industry is investing in experience attributes.

A level playing field where transparency is at the forefront of all transactions will help solidify trust and drive sustainable growth. So, your product looks good, tastes good, and has very positive reviews. Customers can’t get enough; they are voting with their wallets for your product. But there is a third part of information economics you may be missing.

Credence

Credence attributes rely on information asymmetry. Think of used cars as a textbook example: sellers of used cars rely on asymmetry to motivate purchases. Highway miles, adult driven, oil changes every 3,000 miles, etc. are claims that can only be verified by the seller, the buyer has no way of knowing if these are true or not. Credence attributes can’t be verified by the seller due to lack of knowledge or expertise (Ford et al, 1988). The same goes for a consumable good like cannabis, only the grower or manufacturer knows what occurred in the “back of the house.” Product safety, therefore, is a credence attribute of cannabis products.

Investing in credence attributes in a young market may seem cost prohibitive. Many in the cannabis industry simply want to follow whatever the state they operate in dictates as the minimum allowable. In hemp we see states that require QR codes on each product that link to a COA, but many do not. Does the cost to produce the COA and QR code make a product more eye-catching or enhance the experiences? No, but those producing it may pay a hefty price if and when the product makes someone sick.

If a firm relies on fragmented, disparate regulatory bodies to dictate their investments in product safety, they will eventually face credence issues. Is smokable flower grown in Texas safer than that grown in Maine? We don’t have data to support either regulation’s effectiveness, so a firm or industry must dictate what the standard is and stick to it.

We need only look at the leafy green industry to see an example of a product that did not break any regulatory guidelines yet continued to sell a good with very negative credence attributes. How long were folks getting sick from leafy greens prior to them identifying the source? No one knows and that is what makes credence attributes so hard to pin down and develop an ROI formula for. Inputs that yield not-sick people aren’t known until someone gets sick. For leafy greens, they had an advantage – years of studies showing that they were good for you. Cannabis, unfortunately, doesn’t have that leg to stand on and faces an uphill battle gaining public trust.

As soccer moms (and dads) across the nation start to work cannabis into their play date wine sessions, the industry must ensure that they are investing in all avenues of information economics. A level playing field where transparency is at the forefront of all transactions will help solidify trust and drive sustainable growth.

References

Patterson, M. (2017). The economics of information. In Antitrust Law in the New Economy (pp. 39-60). Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press. Retrieved February 7, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvc2rkm6.6

Ford, G., Smith, D.,  and Swasy, J. (1988), An Empirical Test of the Search, Experience and Credence Attributes Framework, in NA – Advances in Consumer Research Volume 15, eds. Micheal J. Houston, Provo, UT : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 239-244.