Photo courtesy of Jason Erkes

Cresco Labs has hired a chief communications officer to help drive its mission of normalizing and professionalizing the cannabis industry, according to CEO Charlie Bachtell.

The multi-state cannabis company chose veteran communications strategist Jason Erkes for this role.

“I hope to be able to carry forward the mission of Cresco, which is to normalize the cannabis industry and have it be viewed as just another form of medicine without the age-old stigma attached to it,” Erkes told Cannabis Business Times. “As the person sharing Cresco’s message with the media, public, medical community, investors and legislators, I intend on continuing to explain and show what we do as a company and how that provides relief to the thousands of suffering patients that are our customers. As a communicator for Cresco, it’s equally important to be a steward of this still-emerging industry as it is to promote the quality brands and products Cresco produces.”

Erkes is a former Emmy-winning journalist and entrepreneur and has served as a consultant to the company for three years. He has been quoted as a media expert in Forbes and Huffington Post, has been a featured speaker across the country lecturing on building brands and managing crisis situations using the media, and has also contributed to Cannabis Business Times and Cannabis Business Executive. Erkes has also helped to forecast the future of the cannabis industry on WGN radio.

“Jason is a great strategist and truly a communications/PR expert,” Bachtell told Cannabis Business Times. “He’s been involved in the media in different capacities for … a while. He’s got a lot of experience. He used to be a reporter. He actually has a couple of Emmys that he received. He understands messaging—he understands the power that it has, the ability to get a point across—and he knows how to do it pretty effectively.”

The team behind Cresco Labs has had a relationship with Erkes since before the company was founded, Bachtell said, and Erkes has helped Cresco think about how to effectively convey messaging since its launch. Erkes has been instrumental in advancing the company’s goals of understanding its audience and developing different messaging for each audience segment, Bachtell added, including regulators and traditional and nontraditional cannabis consumers.

“It’s a concept that we find extreme importance in because when you understand who your audience is … [and] know your audience, you can develop messaging that is most appropriate for that audience segment,” Bachtell said. “We apply that concept and … that analysis in really every component of the business that we do as a cultivator.”

Based in Chicago, Cresco now operates in six states and provides a full suite of products including flower, edibles, vape pens/cartridges and multiple forms of extracts. The company’s mission of normalizing and professionalizing the cannabis industry is done through communicating what cannabis truly is and challenging pre-conceived notions, Bachtell said, and for a rapidly growing company like Cresco, it is vital to have a team member dedicated to these communications.

“It’s so important that people see companies doing these types of normal, traditional, industry-type actions, like having a chief communications officer, and making sure that you are showing the industry what you’re doing and how you’re doing it in a professional way,” he said.

“For us, it was really drafting that new narrative and communicating that to the public,” Bachtell continued. “It was showing them that cannabis can be done in a highly regulated, compliance-focused manner—that it can be professional, that it can incorporate the fundamentals of traditional industries that have existed for a long time and that are ‘done the right way.’ … With the size that we’re at now [and] with the multi-state footprint that we have—with that national company banner that we’re flying—it’s important to have somebody who’s focused on that 100-percent of the time, and for us, that’s the chief communications officer role and that’s Jason.”

Top Image: © Elena | Adobe Stock