Karen Morgan
Chief Marketing Officer
Chalice Farms
Portland, OR
Happy New Year! As we move forward into 2021, we’ve taken some time to reflect on the work we’ve accomplished in 2020 and how we were able to market our products effectively by creating virtual or small-scale events in a more targeted and efficient way.
We quickly learned through the pandemic that we needed to leverage social and digital platforms to create an image for our brand, tell stories about our products, provide health and wellness tips and really focus on building strong brand identities for our various products and lines. Our marketing team worked together to tell our brand story with authentic, targeted burst campaigns and also took the time to develop co-op marketing partnerships with national brands, like Pax. We dedicated time to highlighting our best-in-class farm suppliers and their practices, our finest brands in retail and vendor partnerships and ensured that we were appropriately conveying the stories behind not just our proprietary products, but other brands we carry as well.
Through our varying stages of closures and state mandates, we took time to evaluate what was important to the company, which is always supporting our community and giving back where we can. Cause marketing is at the heart of what we do. We partnered with the Last Prisoner Project through a long-term monetary commitment and have donated percentages of sales to their organization; we partnered with a local nonprofit in the Portland area, the Pink Lemonade Project, for Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October; and we supported local restaurants by spending thousands of dollars on meals to be donated to our local first responders.
It was a challenging year and what we found helped us be the most successful was balancing product campaigns, customer/public education and storytelling. It’s not a one-size-fits-all plan. We are marketing to a diverse customer base with different desires and outcomes and it’s about creating unique experiences that can translate from digital and retail into people’s everyday lives.