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Digital cannabis platform Lift & Co. has updated its marketing and sales data platform to help brands get at more effective insights about cannabis consumers.

Version two of Cohesion, as the company has named the platform, now allows clients to build their own custom dashboards that can compare and combine data from sources such as purchase behaviour, product sentiment and brand equity in order to get more detailed and strategic insights, as well as compare performance with the competition.

Matei Olaru, CEO of Lift & Co., says the new release enables cannabis brands of all sizes to improve marketing effectiveness and help “dollars for cannabis companies…go further than they ever have,” which is important for companies at “a pivotal moment” in an industry that is both relatively young and highly competitive.

The fact that Cohesion uses a combination of both behavioural and attitudinal data is something Lift & Co. promotes as a differentiation point from other cannabis data sources, as well as more traditional data providers that don’t have access to the same legacy of information within the cannabis sector data. This combination, the company claims, provides a 360-degree view for consumer insights that can measure things like how campaigns impact brand awareness or purchase intent, or what products consumers are buying and where, and doing so at a single point that can also be shared across an organization.

“Leveraging data is the best way consumer brands can get a competitive advantage but, too often, too many resources are spent sourcing, stitching together and analyzing the data just to deliver those insights to the business,” said Sean Copeland, VP of data at Lift & Co.

Cohesion first launched in September, and the company says more than 30 Canadian cannabis brands have since subscribed to the service. It was created based on the numerous data sources Lift & Co. has about cannabis consumers and their purchases, from the product reviews that the site was initially focused on, to new features like purchase receipt uploading, its own loyalty program and a point-of-sale concierge to help consumers make purchase decisions.

In Q4 2019, the company had a 498% increase in total receipts and 326% increase in total reviews submitted to the site, compared to the same period a year prior, which covered the months immediately following recreational cannabis legalization in Oct. 2018. Because of the increase in data, Lift & Co. says Cohesion’s accuracy has improved, with it now having a margin of error of +/- 5% at a 95% confidence level for the top 50 brands in Canada.

In the near future, Lift & Co. also plans to launch a previously announced feature called Cohesion Segmentation, which will combine its own cannabis data with CPG consumer insights provided by Nielsen. The company says this will allow brands to identify consumer segments based on trends across categories, as well as track how both they and their competitors interact with those segments. It will also include Adobe Advertising Cloud’s DSP, which was announced for Cohesion last year, to deliver programmatic digital ads to targeted consumers.