Why Providing Market Forecasts, Retail Sales Tracking and Consumer Insights Makes BDSA the Most Reliable Data Source in the Industry
There’s data everywhere. But how do you get to insightful and actionable data that drives business decisions and, more importantly, results?
BDSA has a long-standing history of providing data to the cannabis industry. What makes us different? This post will delve into what makes BDSA‘s approach unique in the cannabis data analytics space.
Our tagline, “Data. Deeper.” fits. “Data” identifies our core resource, the foundation of everything that we do. But data are just collected facts and figures; the insights derived from that data are the key to making informed business decisions and driving results. “Deeper” represents the process by which BDSA turns the vast quantity of data we collect into insights. We employ a wide variety of technology and methodology approaches to leverage the massive amount of data we collect to develop valuable insights for our clients and the global cannabis industry.
BDSA focuses on providing our clients the most accurate, robust, and granular view of the marketplace to make key strategic decisions around pricing, innovation, assortment, category extensions, market expansion, consumer targeting, and beyond.
To do this, we provide a comprehensive suite of data, research and insights across the cannabis market, including point-of-sale data, consumer research and global cannabis industry forecast models. Each of our services informs the others and drives accuracy, granularity and coverage, providing a more comprehensive view across the market. As an example, because we understand the size of the consumer and non-consumer segments and evolution of these segments in California over the past 3.5 years, we are much better suited to forecast where the California market will be over the next 5 years..
As we roll out our new, improved GreenEdge® platform to our clients this week, we have been rearchitecting our data intake and processing infrastructure to enable greater scalability. Since starting more than 5 years ago, BDSA has grown its retail sales tracking reach from covering Colorado to now providing coverage on 8 states, comprising about 60% of expected legal cannabis spending in the U.S. in 2020. And our reach is expanding even more, as we are adding more states along with key Canadian provinces. The technology enhancements we have been making will further enable us to quickly receive and organize data, process it, analyze it, and make insights available to clients.
Our data are derived from several sources:
Retail Sales Tracking
Every month, BDSA receives daily retail cannabis data on transactions from more than a thousand cannabis retailers. That data is imported, cleaned, standardized, and processed to yield state- and province-wide sales estimates at category, brand and product levels. We have processed raw transaction data covering more than $1 billion in sales so far this year.
Every line item we receive from our retail partners is reviewed, verified, standardized and categorized to ensure accuracy. This process takes time ~3,000 labor-hours each month, but our top priority is to provide accurate data you can trust to make key business decisions.
We are a market research firm that understands how to statistically develop market sizing and sales panels. BDSA focuses on ensuring our panel of retailers is representative of the total market – it isn’t just about the number of stores on the panel, but more importantly that the panel is diverse and representative of the entire market.
Our level of detail for our brand and product level data is incomparable and covers the best selling cannabis strains and best selling cannabis brands. From flavors, THC mg, CBD mg, pack counts, cartridge sizes, CBD:THC, and more, our cannabis market sales data provides a deeper look with greater insight.
Consumer Insights
BDSA’s twice-annual consumer research studies collate data from around 20,000 respondents across the United States and Canada. Those respondents are broken into groups we term Consumers, Acceptors, and Rejecters™, based upon their consumption of cannabis or lack thereof. Each is asked an average of 75 questions each, generating some 200 data points for each respondent.
Industry Intelligence
In addition to retail sales tracking data and consumer insights, we have a team of analysts constantly working to update our market forecast models that cover more than 40 countries, with detailed modeling of each U.S. state and many territories as well as the 13 Canadian provinces and territories. The total cannabis model builds on that foundation with modeling of the dispensary, pharmaceutical, and general retail channels for CBD and other non-psychoactive cannabis. BDSA analysts use a host of proprietary, public company, government, and other data to construct, maintain, and update these models. With this week’s market forecast updates, we have added category-level forecasts for each U.S. state.
Only BDSA provides a holistic understanding of the global cannabis industry by generating comprehensive, accurate and actionable insights across point-of-sale data, consumer research and global cannabis industry forecast models. Each of our services informs the others and drives accuracy, granularity and coverage, providing a more comprehensive view across the market.
BDSA clients access our data and insights via our award-winning GreenEdge platform. There, they have access to dashboards and can analyze the data they need to make informed business decisions. BDSA also makes insights available to clients via a variety of qualitative reports and other documents that cover a number of topics—including blog posts, presentations, white papers and our Essentials newsletter, provided exclusively to clients to provide insights on key cannabis industry topics each month. From regulations to policy to emerging markets and hemp-derived CBD, we cover it all.
The work we do at BDSA helps our many valued clients and partners, including brands, retailers and investors both inside and outside the cannabis industry to make the most informed business decisions possible. BDSA’s data assets are the core of our ability to do that and we will continue expand and improve our capabilities as the burgeoning global cannabis industry grows and matures.