Culture Collective
Building community through cannabis.
What does it look like when a cannabis company supports culture?
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The Missouri cannabis market is vastly diverse, from the major metros to college towns to the Ozark Mountains to the northern farmlands. The BeLeaf Company recently approached CARTEL with the idea to develop a cannabis brand that would “brush a broad stroke across a diverse set of audience segments, while connecting authentically to each.”
The brand name, Culture Collective, had already been decided. The name reflected the business strategy: The state of Missouri is home to many cultures and the goal was to build a collective of those cultures through cannabis.
The challenge then became how to take such a broad concept and form it into a brand identity that would serve the business strategy while maintaining authenticity between audiences. So we gathered a group of Missourians from different backgrounds for an ideation session at CARTEL’s studio. We asked them: what brands do you love, and why? What does culture mean to you? What does it look like when a cannabis company supports culture?
The result was a process of discovery and collaboration that created CUCO, a collective of communities empowered and connected by cannabis. CUCO is the shorthand name for Culture Collective. It reminded us of a type of bird, so we began sketching scenes of CUCO birds, each with their own activity, and a place for them to gather called CUCOLAND. A brand hatched—packaging, website and all.
As graphic designers, our greatest attention is often put toward delivering the most efficient and impactful ways of visually communicating an idea or feeling. When we pictured a logo for Culture Collective, our first instinct was to go back to nomenclature and come up with a shorter, catchier name for the brand: CUCO. CUCO would strategically veil the business strategy and leave in its place a word to be defined by a collective of culture creators and their audiences.
