Understanding the consumer and their relationship to the company’s brands becomes complex when, like Tilray, you own a broad menu of global and local choices—from wellness and cannabis products to beverages and craft brewing. Could insights-driven marketing help supercharge Tilray Brands’ market growth?
“Being able to hold on to what’s true about your brand and not compromise that but make subtle shifts is something that Tilray is very focused on,” says Rebecca Morgan, Marketing Director at Tilray Brands. “Insights are critical in being able to manage that balance.”
Tilray’s marketing team embedded real-time consumer insights into three critical functions: product innovation, sales enablement, and cultural marketing. Their approach offers a model for marketing teams that need to move faster while making decisions based on consumer insights.
In an interview, Tilray Brands’ Morgan and Joshua Nuu-Steele, Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer at Ideally, discussed their partnership, the evolution of consumer insights at the company, AI and human empowerment, and more.
The Challenge of Focusing on Diverse Consumer Audiences
Morgan emphasizes that marketers must understand not only their current consumer but their growth consumer—from demographics to psychographics and geographics. “Gone are the days where we could take time to methodically plot out these long lead research studies,” she says. “We need to be able to make real-time decisions that are catering to our core consumer and our growth consumer in specific and tangible ways.”
As a global lifestyle company, Tilray owns brands like SweetWater Brewing Company, Montauk Brewing Company, Breckenridge Distillery, and many more in the cannabis/wellness, beverage, and CPG space. It’s a diverse group of branded products with different consumer audiences and specific marketing needs. Understanding consumer behavior becomes a significant endeavor. Enter partners like Ideally that can help build that insights infrastructure.
Morgan explains that Tilray focuses on empowering consumers to live better lives. Working across the wellness portfolio—including Manitoba Harvest, a plant and hemp-based super food brand, plus energy and functional beverage brands—requires achieving both national and local relevance. “Being able to nuance data and understand how we relate to local audiences is really important,” she says.
Nuu-Steele adds that Ideally enables brands like Tilray to speak with their consumers and get feedback overnight: “What is exciting is the capability from AI. You’re able to get the insights and white space surfaced in real time. When you’re preparing for a retail meeting, you can pop into Ideally and get a high-level overview of the core categories. Traditionally, you would need to do a study that would cost a significant amount. I believe that the low cost and low barrier make it easier to understand both your consumer and new categories.”
Bringing Insights into Action
Tilray leveraged Ideally’s insights-driven approach in a variety of ways. A key focus was product-level innovation and exploration, says Morgan.
“We were exploring a brand extension, and we needed to understand how we could create a distinction with a new product range but avoid confusion with our existing one,” says Morgan. “We really needed to retain brand equity with existing consumers, while introducing creative elements that signaled a new fun, functional product range.”
For the Manitoba Harvest brand expansion, the product testing landed somewhere in the middle range, giving the team confidence—especially in key geographic areas where they could assess whether they’d avoid confusion and retain consumers. “That was key to our decision-making on how to proceed with that brand innovation,” she says.
An additional service that Tilray found successful is tapping into Ideally data for retailer meetings. Morgan recalls facing challenges making traction with a beverage retailer. “Rather than presenting with a traditional sales deck, we used Ideally’s data foundation to survey trending flavors, formats, and functional ingredients. Then we took that data as a trend analysis to this retailer presentation. We led them on a journey to identify the white space opportunity in their portfolio.”
Morgan adds that they used the data to match existing products to the retailer’s white space and showcase Tilray’s customization capabilities. “It really built credibility for us as a business and as a partner. It was a totally different approach to sales and marketing, which engaged and strengthened our relationship with them.”
Tapping into cultural moments, from a marketing and communications perspective, also quickly took shape using Ideally’s AI-driven insights.
For example, for “Dry January,” a key promotional and marketing event in the functional beverage space, Tilray used Ideally to gain consumer insights around participation and what consumers qualify as “dry.”
“We took that to several media outlets, and we were able to be quoted and be participants in a lot of Dry January conversations using that Ideally data and to garner product placement strategically,” says Morgan. “That ease of access has really been able to kick off multiple areas of our business.”
Keeping Humans in the Loop
Nuu-Steele describes Ideally like a pyramid. The foundation is a usage and attitude study—a range of questions per category asking about the consumer’s emotional and functional needs, where they’re shopping, and which competitors they’re purchasing. “That just means that all of your testing is grounded in your category first and foremost. That’s critical because when you do a test in isolation, it might score really well, but what is that scoring well against?” he says.
That foundation generates white space—opportunities to extend a product range, create a new service or product, or alter messaging or collateral.
In the middle frame of the pyramid are research frameworks built by a research team. They are the concept tests, message tests, and they essentially are off the shelf, but they are also customizable. “That is the function that goes out to market, goes to the consumers that you need to speak to overnight, and comes back into the Ideally platform,” says Nuu-Steele.
At the top of the pyramid is the synthetic element, he adds. “Our synthetic is baked into all of our human responses. It’s not going out and scraping open-source channels—we use guardrails to protect brands like Tilray and ensure that their investment gets the outcome that they need.”
Despite the influx of new AI tools in market research, Ideally feels it can still remain deeply human and actionable.
Nuu-Steele notes that synthetic research has come a long way, but there’s still misunderstanding about different types of synthetic data. “What is more important is using synthetic to create a faster pace in research, but having it baked in real human truths that have guardrails and methodologies,” he says. “A synthetic layer sitting on top of several years’ worth of true research that has continuously used the same methodology—you will have very high confidence.”
“Bringing the human in the loop is where you get the nuance, where you get the edges that really bolster both your creativity and your innovation,” adds Nuu-Steele.
Applying Lessons Learned Along the Way
For Tilray, the advantages and results of insights-driven research and marketing, both using the AI and human elements, benefitted its brands and business growth.
“It helps us test and learn,” Morgan concludes. “Whether we’re launching a new communications campaign or a brand concept, it helps us evaluate the opportunity before we’re in the market, especially with a particular geographic area. How will this price land? How will this positioning land? It’s allowing us to resonate with the core consumer in a different way.”
Video: Watch the video for the full interview with Joshua Nuu-Steele, Co-Founder & CRO at Ideally, and Rebecca Morgan, Marketing Director at Tilray Brands.
