Consumers and Marketing

Consumers are changing how they react to marketing. Consumers are willing to pay an annual fee to read good content; consumers will become “members” of restaurants, becoming part of a community; consumers are looking to be different, and Generation Z has zero loyalty.

The last decade of consumer company building, aka direct-to-consumer, taught us a lot. Particularly as we amplified marketing spend during Covid, many brands benefited until they didn’t, and that Covid high ended for many companies. The idea of spending as much capital as possible because money was cheap to acquire customers and build a consumer company as fast as possible never made sense to me. When you are running at that pace, you generally trip. That fall brings down a lot of people with you.

Social media tools have improved, so targeting is not as expensive as it used to be. Twitter has fallen into an abyss, Instagram is still an extremely powerful tool, Facebook not so much, and what happens with Threads is still unclear.

How does a company be clever about finding customers who want to be part of each company’s consumer experience without pouring money down a giant funnel? We are trying to be smart at Gotham in building our customer base and have people return for the experience and the product assortment.

Gotham is a merger of a store, cannabis products, and non-cannabis products that we also ship, including our private label line and events, with delivery on the horizon. It is a unique marketing opportunity that I am thinking about, and we are tossing a bunch of stuff on the wall. The one thing we are not going to do is spend thousands of dollars pushing ads.

I would love to hear from others on how they are thinking about marketing these days.