Vic Mensa shares marketing insights at MJBizCon

Vic Mensa did the reading.

The Chicago-born-and-bred musician and entrepreneur did most everything successful executives do before he launched the Second City’s first Black-owned cannabis brand, 93 Boyz.

Where did the name 93 Boyz come from? Mensa and his partner were born in 1993, so they are the 93 Boyz.

He did the product and market research, and he enacted a successful pre-legalization strategy. (Or, put another way: As a teenager on the South Side, he took two trains across the city to access the best flower he could find before taking it back to the neighborhood to sell.)

But before his foray into the legal cannabis industry with 93 Boyz – a bid to build off the celebrity and success earned in a music career that’s seen him record with Roc Nation before his first independent release earlier this summer – he sat down to carefully prepare and applied knowledge from books.

“I’d seen the ways the right book at the right time can radically transform an experience,” he told MJBizDaily recently. “I’ve seen friends of mine manifest their way out of incarceration using the principles in some of these books.”

He knew he had a story to sell: a South Side kid who hustled in the streets and struck cultural gold in the recording studio.

But through careful reading of “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding,” by Al Ries and Laura Ries, he knew brands need stories, too – a coherent narrative that customers sign onto with every purchase.

And in “Building a Story Brand 2.0,” by Donald Miller, he knew if that story isn’t clearly told, in the packaging and marketing and even the color scheme, the effort will fall short, no matter how well funded or set up – and no matter how strong the cultural connection between music and a product like cannabis might be.

“These are the foundational truths of branding and creating something that stands out: something that has a clear narrative and is purpose-driven,” said Mensa, who will share some of these truths at MJBizCon via an intimate fireside chat at 11 a.m. Dec. 3.

That’s the impersonal side of things. The personal side is an entirely different story.

“At the end of the day, it’s dealing with people,” he cautioned. “Dealing with people and creating things.”

“And that’s … difficult,” he said. “That requires a lot of tact.”

From the streets to the studio to the store

Most cannabis brands are desperate for the kind of street cred and authentic clout that a popular rapper with real-world traditional market experience brings to the table.

Maybe there are some investors or founders out there who think the transition from legacy to legal is simple and easy for someone with existing fame. Celebrity plus investors plus weed equals success, right?

Let Mensa correct the record. Neither the traditional market nor the music industry alone is adequate preparation  for the “constant challenges” in legal cannabis: getting vendors to pay bills, keeping positive cash flow, paying taxes – and handling it all with grace.

“I would say that my experience in cannabis is defined by challenges,” he said. “This business has had a steep learning curve and been an experience of how to handle things gracefully.

“I am constantly realizing the rules of my old life don’t apply here. If somebody doesn’t pay you, you don’t kick in their door. The things that we go through on that side don’t carry over.

“But I think that’s why those books are so valuable to me,” he added.

“They help to give me a different set of tools and a different framework with which to operate.

“My old framework is in a completely different world, and it doesn’t serve me in a lot of the spaces I’m in now.”

No permit required

Just getting in the door has been a challenge that Mensa hasn’t yet finished.

Illinois and Michigan were the first two states in the Midwest to launch adult-use marijuana sales. The first sale in Michigan was in December 2019, with Illinois following a few weeks later.

It took Illinois even longer to devise a marijuana social equity program tailored for people like Mensa – people of color, people from the streets, people with less capital than a multistate operator.

When the market finally opened up for smaller operators, Mensa and his team applied for cultivation and retail licenses.

And they didn’t get a single one.

“The equity programs have been complicated,” he said. “In many instances they’ve been coopted so that the same people can continue to make the money.”

To this day, neither Mensa nor 93 Boyz hold a legal cannabis business permit.

Undaunted, he found a cultivator to partner with, and that’s how he developed a product and a brand line – a feat that would have been more difficult if he wasn’t already prepared with ideas and a narrative.

Finding an entry point was a goal Mensa pursued partly thanks to advice from Dan Pettigrew, co-founder of Viola Brands.

“He’s my mentor,” Mensa said. “And he was adamant to me to get my foot in the door whatever way I needed to get in and make it happen.

“Things will be different once you can be negotiating from a place of experience and leverage.”

Back to the books

The success Mensa is finding with 93 Boyz is putting some of these same books in the hands of people who might need them. 93 Boyz is helping fund Mensa’s Books Before Bars program, which sends these and other books – “The Autobiography of Malcom X” by Alex Haley; books by authors bell hooks and Eckhart Tolle and books about Eastern philosophy – to incarcerated people.

There’s one thing vital to the success of his brand that didn’t come from a book, however. The packaging can shine, the story can sing – but what’s inside absolutely counts.

That’s something he learned early on, selling cannabis as a teenager, when he’d take two trains from the South Side to find the dealer who had the Master Kush and OG Kush that, back on the block, turned heads and kept people coming back.

“Product quality is obviously pivotal,” he said. “It’s completely necessary, but it’s hard to say if it’s the most important factor.

“It depends what you’re going for, but at the end of the day, if you’ve got the best … branding and you don’t have a quality flower inside of the package, it won’t work.”

There are lessons anyone in the cannabis space or thinking about jumping in could use – no reading necessary – but Mensa also has some sage advice for fellow musicians and others with existing celebrity: Sell good weed, and the rest will follow.

“I think a lot of celebrity cannabis brands fail because an artist wants to put their name on it and step back,” he continued.

“That’s never been my angle. I’m very hands on and involved: the design, choosing the cultivators, the dispensary sales strategies.”