According to a recent YouGov survey on who – or what – Americans think is “cool,” only 36% of respondents ranked marijuana as “very” or “somewhat” cool. That puts cannabis near the bottom of the list, below math, country music, sourdough bread, pickleball, and even online surveys. The good news? Cannabis still outranked guns, sports betting, and cryptocurrency. So, you know, small victories.
But the real question is: what does “cool” even mean?
Cool is one of those slippery cultural ideas everyone recognizes and almost no one can define. It’s taste. Timing. Confidence. Style. It’s knowing what not to say. It’s being interesting without looking like you’re trying to be interesting. Which, of course, makes asking people to rank “coolness” in an online survey both fascinating and deeply uncool.
So what does this actually mean for cannabis brands?
Cannabis has spent decades being coded as rebellious, underground, taboo, medicinal, wellness-oriented, premium, mainstream, and occasionally all of those things at once. That makes it hard for the category to own one clear cultural meaning. To some consumers, cannabis feels progressive and expressive. To others, it feels overhyped, confusing, too regulated, too stoner-coded, too wellness-focused, or simply irrelevant.
That’s the challenge with cannabis marketing: “cool” is not a positioning strategy. In fact, the harder a brand tries to look cool, the faster it usually becomes the opposite.
And maybe that’s the point. The most successful cannabis brands don’t need every American to think cannabis is cool. They need the right consumers to understand what the brand stands for, trust the experience, and come back again. In a maturing market, credibility beats hype. Consistency beats novelty. And a clear, ownable point of view beats chasing whatever the internet currently thinks is cool – which, apparently, may include sourdough.
At Telegrafik, we’ve worked with cannabis brands long enough to know that cool can be useful, but it can’t be the whole brief. Great brands are built on sharper questions: Who is this for? What role does it play in their life? Why should they trust it? Why should they choose it again?
Because trends move. Audiences shift. Categories mature. And once everyone agrees something is cool, it usually has about ten minutes before it becomes a tote bag or a limited-edition collab.
Still, at least America found one thing it can agree on: Samuel L. Jackson is cool. More than 70% of Americans rated him at least somewhat cool, which may be the most gratifying data point we have left.
