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The rules are meant to ensure young people don’t find any cannabis product too enticing, but they may have the effect of confusing customers in a crowded marketplace. As legalization approaches, the National Post spoke to two branding experts about the tactics six leading producers have employed to create a distinct visual identity for their brands.

Aphria

Photo by https://aphria.com/

Some cannabis producers with an established record of selling marijuana for medical purposes have begun to differentiate the products they sell in that space from those they plan to bring to a broader audience starting this fall. One such company is Aphria, a Leamington, Ont., grower that touts its use of state-of-the-art greenhouses to cultivate each of its strains.

Visitors to Aphria’s corporate website are greeted by the tagline “powered by sunlight” over the image of an employee in a hairnet and a white medical coat. Will Novosedlik, a Toronto-based writer and brand strategist, said the company is positioning itself as clinical and safety-oriented; its logo, which is light green and two placid shades of blue, appears pharmaceutical. The imagery stands in contrast to that of Solei, Aphria’s recreational brand, which uses photos of flowers and the colour yellow to urge potential buyers to “find your light.”

Bruce Philp, a brand consultant in Toronto, said this suggests Solei will target a segment of the recreational market that values organic, farm-to-table production processes — people who will bring the brand into their lives “because they want to escape and meditate and connect with things that are for them more real and meaningful.” But he cautioned that the logo, a cursive, yellow rendering of the name “Solei” that to him evokes a 1980s yoga studio, may not convey this ethos as strongly if it appears alone on packaging.