Lisa Buffo
Company: Cannabis Marketing Association
Title: Founder and CEO
Age: 29
As the founder and CEO of the Cannabis Marketing Association, Lisa Buffo has advice on how best to grow the cannabis companies and the industry in general: Education. In her eyes, reducing the stigma associated with cannabis and its use is the key to bringing more customers into stores.
“Cannabis isn’t one of those things where you can put out a nice, fancy campaign with a simple message and really cool colors if the people viewing it still think it’s a drug,” she says.
Buffo started the Cannabis Marketing Association in 2016 with the mission of bringing a positive perception to, and authentic understanding of, cannabis and its consumers around the world.
“By empowering the marketers to do their jobs … we can have the biggest impact on the stigma issue,” she says.
Buffo grew up outside Cleveland, went to school at the University of Maryland and then worked at tech startups in the Cleveland area before moving to Colorado to work at Canopy Boulder where she helped that company put on its first accelerator class.
The Cannabis Marketing Association hosts events around the country, every one of which is filmed and put online for the company’s members. Buffo is also working to develop best practices when it comes to cannabis marketing and she says she is excited to schedule events in even more cities around the country as the industry expands.
“We’re at a really exciting time in history,” she says.