Overcoming CBD Marketing Hurdles with Prismatic Plant’s Sarah Polansky

The Quest for E-Commerce Success

Sarah Polansky was a design-thinking researcher & business strategist for over 10+ years before turning her interest towards entrepreneurship and becoming the Founder of the Health & Wellness Organisation Prismatic Plants.

Sarah now focuses on helping people heal from chronic stress and illness by educating them about the powers of plant-based medicine and encouraging their own advocacy in managing their health.

Sarah has been at the forefront of the movement to destigmatize cannabis use and make it a mainstay of the U.S. market, especially in the women’s health sector, and working in the cannabis industry has meant she has had to overcome extreme business-building hurdles due to antiquated regulations (or lack thereof).

Sarah has created the vision, strategy, and execution for all customer touchpoints (website, product, packaging, social, email), led product development, oversaw custom manufacturing, created 3rd party testing protocols, constructed a sustainable supply chain with small farmers using regenerative agriculture, managed resources, finances and determined the best growth strategy. Here are a few of the topics we’ll discuss on this episode of The Quest for E-Commerce Success:

• Using market research and design strategy to find new popular products.
• The challenges of marketing a cannabis brand with the current regulations.
• The benefits cannabis has over pharmaceutical drugs.
• The need for increased education around plant medicines.
• How providing education around a substance can help your brand marketing.
• Ways to acquire customers as a CBD brand with the red tape around the industry.
• How to build a relationship with your customers.

Resources:

• Prismatic Plants
• Fall Line Digital

Connecting with Sarah Polansky:

• LinkedIn
• Email

Connecting with the host:

• Rebecca Babicz on LinkedIn

Quotables

• 10:55 - “What I learn every day from my customers and from people that are interested in becoming a customer is that there is still so much uncertainty around what cannabis is, what CBD is, what it does, and I’ve really found that education has to be the backbone of our company.”
• 12:42 - “Even healing in a pharmaceutical setting there’s a lot of work being done where they're showing that this plant has amazing capabilities for healing things that we didn't think was possible.”
• 17:15 - “How do you carve out that white space for yourself because as everyone knows the cannabis industry and the hemp industry specifically is just so incredibly crowded and so I think it’s our formulations and our brand experience that we try to use to set us apart.”
• 33:51 - “Even when all else fails in terms of where you go next there’s always another door and it just takes a little bit of time and research to think about what is that way to keep growing the company, so I would encourage people to not just rely heavily on only ads but think about what are the other types of things in and around my brand that I can build my brand up to offer a bit more stability around the growth.”