PODCAST Ep. 5 - From CMO to CEO w/ Joe Hodas of Wana Brands

On this week's podcast we also talk about Joe's journey to CEO, the importance of brand awareness and how hard it is to reach budtenders and consumers.

Back in March we covered a story about how Starbucks was eliminating their CMO role after promoting their global chief marketing officer to CEO and deciding not to fill the position.

Eliminating the CMO role is something that other big companies like Walgreens, Etsy and UPS have opted for, and that others like McDonald’s and Coca-Cola have reversed course on after deciding to do away with that spot in their C-Suite.

After learning more about some of these examples, the most important takeaway for me (which is made evident by the fact that Starbucks promoted their CMO to CEO) was the need to ensure that whoever is leading your marketing efforts is deeply involved in business strategy discussions.

This integration ensures that marketing initiatives are aligned with broader business objectives so that you are making investments in marketing that will drive positive results for your bottom line — or at least being clear when you are investing in brand awareness vs sales driven marketing.

If you want to learn more about how some Fortune 500 companies have been thinking about the evolution of the CMO role, be sure to check out our post from March:

5 Ways Cannabis Marketers Can Build Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) Into Their Workflow

Given this specific storyline out of Starbucks, I was really excited to get a chance to sit down with Joe Hodas from Wana Brands.

He was recently promoted from CMO to President and will soon take over as CEO of the company as the founder Nancy Whiteman prepares to step away, so we got a chance to chat with him about what that means for other marketers in the industry, what he sees for the future of cannabis marketing and much more.

As a reminder, CannabisCMO paid subscribers are getting access to this recording (and all future podcasts) two days before it will be released on all podcast platforms so make sure you sign up for as little as $8.33/mo (with an annual subscription).

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