The 5 Ps of Marketing Psychedelics
The "4 Ps" are one of the most fundamental concepts in marketing. How could they possibly apply to psychedelics, and why should you care? For marketing communications to be most effective, there's no avoiding these considerations. Whether your organization is a profit-driven corporation looking to maximize shareholder returns or an anti-capitalist nonprofit fighting for justice, getting your message across to your target audience is essential. One way or another, if you want to have any chance of changing what people do, they need to hear what you're saying and be convinced to act on it.
When you have unimpeachably worthwhile aims or a fantastic product, it can be easy to think that you can skip over these considerations. This is particularly true when you're driven by the lingering afterglow of a psychedelic experience that told you exactly what you wanted to hear.
But, if psychedelics are anything like every other product or movement in history (and I'm going to assume they are), when it comes to demonstrating the value of your product or mission, you're going to have to do the work. Or, instead, you might need to hire a psychedelic content writer to do it for you.
In this post, I'll define the 4 Ps of marketing and talk about how they apply to psychedelics. As part of this discussion, I'll digress into some areas where there are practical or ethical difficulties. But the title does say 5 Ps of marketing I'll also give special attention to the 5th p relevant in this space: prohibition.
My desk was too messy, so here’s one that is absolutely an accurate representation of what real marketing work looks like.
What are the 5 Ps of marketing?
The 4 Ps of marketing, sometimes known as the "marketing mix," is a concept that summarizes the four fundamental pillars of any marketing strategy.
The four Ps of marketing are:
Product: This is what you sell or are offering. It could be physical goods, services, consulting, and so on.
Price: How much do you charge, and how does that impact your customers' view of your brand?
Place: Where do you promote your product or service? Where do your ideal customers go to find information about your industry?
Promotion: How do your customers find out about you? What strategies do you use, and are they effective?
Sometimes, there's a 5th P, "People." But today, I'm including one I think is directly relevant to psychedelics: Prohibition.
The 5 Ps of marketing examples for psychedelics
Product
Psilocybe subaeruginosa, copyright: Psychedelic Overground, 2021.
In psychedelics, there is a vast range of products on offer. This is especially true if you consider "product" to be not just any physical good or non-physical service you want someone to purchase, but also any change in behavior or belief you want someone to adopt.
Actual examples of psychedelic products, or potential products, include:
MindMed's possible LSD product (likely an analog or prodrug) to treat depression and generalized anxiety disorder
Enosis Therapeutics' psychedelic-assisted therapy plus VR therapeutic model
Mind Medicine Institute's Certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy (CPAT)
“Psilocybin chocolate” such as Seromoni or Polkadot Psilocybe mushroom bars
Mimosa Therapeutics' Nycer Mycelium Pearls
The Australian Psychedelic Society's Journey Blanket (coming soon!)
Senate Bill 519, which proposed to decriminalize several psychedelics in California
Given the massive range of things that could come under the banner of psychedelic products, it's hard to generalize on some overarching principle that applies to all possibilities. But within specific categories, some observations on psychedelic marketing are worthwhile.
There is a very steep hill of regulatory approval for therapeutic products to climb. No matter how much hype gets built up, these medications will have to show efficacy and safety in more extensive trials than have been conducted so far. And in doing so, they need to convince risk-averse health professionals to utilize them. If they can overcome both obstacles, business will likely be good.
Educational offerings will need to be increasingly evidence-based. This trend is likely for personal training, such as typified by Third Wave, and more professionally-oriented offerings such as the Mind Medicine Institute certificate. As markets mature, that a course exists or that it has slick marketing won't be enough to keep new students enrolling. Meeting accreditation by education and health regulators will be critical for professional qualifications in many markets. Students do not enroll in medical or engineering degrees that don't guarantee professional accreditation at the end may years of hard study. Eventually, courses in psychedelic-assisted therapy will need to go down this same route.
Regardless of the product, the one generalization that holds is that organizations need to know their target audience and what they need to do to convince them to make certain decisions or take specific actions. Some confusion seems to occur at this point, often because organizations don't recognize their relevant stakeholders.
E.g., suppose you want to bring a new psychedelic therapeutic product to market. In that case, you need to convince regulators and politicians (and their constituents.) Your product might be a nifty MDMA analog. But convincing people to take it and health professionals to prescribe it are not the only behaviors you need to change. If you fail to recognize this, you will never sell a single pill.
Of course, if you want to get investors to buy your stock and aren't that worried about ever bringing a product to market, you can stick to hype aimed at desperate, greedy, or credulous audiences. This is purely hypothetical, as no business has ever taken such an approach, and absolutely no psychedelic industry marketing is directed to this end.
Price
The cost of developing a new medication and getting it to market is immense. So, the incentive to keep the unit cost high definitely exists. If a non-patented psychedelic drug is used, profit would have to come from the cost of therapeutic services or settings. Initial research on psychedelic-assisted therapy indicates the impacts could be long-lasting, which will compound this. If only a few organizations are offering or controlling access to a product, chances are the unit price will be even higher.
As with so many factors, potential monopolies present an ethical conundrum for the nascent psychedelic pharmaceutical industry. Lack of competition keeps the price high but places the product, and therefore the relief from suffering it is supposed to bring, out of reach of the bulk of people who need it. Such a situation is unlikely to inspire much grassroots support.
The same can be said for education offerings, where there are limited psychedelic-specific options (e.g., Australia) or where mainstream universities do not yet have psychedelic-related courses (e.g., almost everywhere.) The high cost of providing quality accredited education and training will put a floor under this. But the first providers who can get their courses to the point where they can access government student loan schemes, such as the HELP system in Australia, will have an enormous advantage.
It can be tempting to think that price only applies to for-profit organizations. Not true! Nonprofits and charities still need to be financially solvent, even if they don't distribute profit to anyone.
What if no money is changing hands? E.g., you're trying to convince someone to take action on an issue such as supporting the decriminalization of psychedelics. In this situation, there is a non-monetary cost associated with them sharing your posts on social media or having awkward conversations with friends and family. Even changing a belief can exact a psychological price. If it's a deeply held one, this cost might be high, and people will be resistant, clinging to what is more comfortable, familiar, or convenient.
Being right is fantastic. But it's not the same as being effective. If you want people to change what they do and how they think, you need to find ways to lower that psychological cost of doing so. Sure, you can try to make the cost of not changing unfeasibly high for them. But this can backfire and cause people to dig their heels in, so it's an approach to be used with caution.
Place
For psychedelic marketing, place is more than a country or shopfront. It's tied to where products are available for purchase and, therefore, in what form. Given the legal status of psychedelics worldwide (more on that later,) this produces interesting and varied examples.
Businesses offering psychedelic retreats often operate in countries where the legal situation allows this, e.g., Mushroom Tao in Costa Rica or Synthesis in Amsterdam. But, to pretend that no one offers these services for money in jurisdictions where it's highly illegal to do so would be disingenuous. In some countries, this is barely spoken about, and you'll struggle to find a trace of these facilitators or therapists online. In others, these services are easily discoverable via Google, despite the legal issues.
Place, when applied to the web, also blurs into promotion. But the question, even virtually, is the same: Where is your customer (or whomever it is you need to reach?) Whether your customer is on Reddit, Linkedin, or darknet markets, if you want to sell to them, that's where your organization's product and presence needs to be.
In the case of pursuing legislative change, place is of crucial importance as the elected politicians you need to convince can often be removed from normal channels of communication and insulated from regular public interaction. When the "place" your product needs to be is the desk of a Senator, who are the intermediary staffers you need to go through?
Place remains a complex concept in psychedelics, as the combination of illegality and stigma collides with fascination and hype. Whether they are Golden Teacher chocolates or courses that claim to teach how to undertake psychedelic-assisted therapy, psychedelic products seem to have no place but are everywhere.
Promotion
One day it will be possible to promote psychedelics without stereotypically countercultural imagery or pictures of the wrong mushrooms. But we're not quite at that point yet. Strange polarities exist in how different organizations or individuals use psychedelic industry branding to visually represent various goods and services. Underground or gray-area operators selling psychedelics can sometimes be very up-front about the trippy aspect of their products. Pharmaceutical corporations developing psychedelic medications use more subtle imagery if they refer to anything hallucinogenic or mystical at all.
In all cases, organizations and individuals seek to craft written and visual messages that resonate with their target audiences. This message is direct for illicit or unregulated products, and very much "it does what it says on the box." (That said, for illicit products, what is in the box might be something different, e.g., there are reports that some psilocybe chocolate bars actually contain 4-AcO-DMT, other synthetics, or no psychedelics at all.) In the case of corporate players keen to distance present a more mainstream image, the language tends to be more clinical and business-focussed, accompanied by minimalist and pastel visual presentations.
Screenshot of a well-known supposedly Psilocybin-containing chocolate bar, with extremely subtle packaging.
For now, in corporate areas, much of the work of promotion runs on a combination of a press release-fueled hype train and aggressive backlink strategies. Smaller businesses, either through being more agile or due to sheer need, have recognized the usefulness of more content-driven SEO and community partnerships in promoting their messages. Depending on their focus, nonprofits can fall at either end of this spectrum. Everyone makes use of social networks. Interestingly, informal personal networks still play a significant role because of how new the psychedelic business is (on a broad scale, at least). Depending on what you want to achieve, "who you know" can still play a pivotal role.
Ethical implications abound in marketing psychedelic products. Some of these are the same as in any commercial environment: How accurate is the information contained in promotion messaging? Is it targeting vulnerable people? Is this consumer item/service/idea a good thing for people to purchase or believe? But putting psychedelics into the mix amplifies potential problems. How good is the science that forms the basis of these marketing claims? Are the claims of therapeutic efficacy supported by available evidence? Is there a problem with creating demand for products that are not legally available?
Prohibition
The societal elephant in the room for psychedelic marketing is prohibition, which touches on our language and choices around virtually every psychedelic or psychedelic-adjacent product you can imagine (and some you can't.)
For many organizations, prohibition is a sort of moral hazard, where instead of risking other people's money, they risk other people's liberty and mental health. People become desperate if you're promoting psychedelics as a treatment for depression or PTSD but don't take steps to make it available. The hype around a therapy might be a set of numbers, but the suffering of these people is real. This disconnect between desire and availability drives people to seek psychedelics through underground channels, exposing them to legal risk and unregulated guides or therapists.
Suppose you are wealthy enough to travel to Costa Rica or The Netherlands and go to a lovely retreat to do your personal psychedelic work. In that case, your liberty isn't at risk, unlike those who hang on your promises of relief from their mental illnesses but cannot afford to travel. The bare minimum that organizations in this situation are obligated to do is provide harm-reduction information and advice for the people who are currently seeking access to psychedelics. Claiming that your interest is "wholly clinical" or distancing your organization from drug-law reform doesn't cut it.
The fact that prohibition can be profitable provides further incentive for some organizations to act unethically. Why would anyone pay many thousands of dollars to buy your synthetic psilocin analog and use it in your clinic when they could grow some Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms or buy them from a dispensary and then work with an integration psychologist at a fraction of the cost? That some companies cannot answer this question is apparent, as they continue to be lukewarm or outright hostile towards decriminalization efforts. Let me be clear: supporting a situation where people get jail time for possession and use of psychedelics, knowing that this increases your profit margins, is morally repugnant (hence my views on whose business I will take - see my FAQ for more.)
Other problems are amplified by prohibition and its associated stigma. That some health professionals in many areas, including mental health, do not always treat their patients or clients appropriately is not a new phenomenon. But when something like psychedelic-assisted therapy is fighting for mainstream acceptance, there is a potential incentive to turn a blind eye to therapists' alleged unethical or dangerous behavior. Apart from being deeply wrong, this would be ultimately counterproductive. Likewise, in underground contexts, the illegality of psychedelics exacerbates ethical failures by raising the personal cost and difficulty of taking action to hold people accountable or prevent further harm.
In the same way that prohibition makes all drugs more dangerous, it makes potential ethical problems worse than they would otherwise be. This, in my mind, is why legal reform is so significant.
For the record, I also think the threat that decriminalization or legalization poses to therapeutic profits is overblown. That I can give someone a shoulder rub has yet to bankrupt the professional massage or physiotherapy industries. People having helpful conversations doesn't mean no one will pay to see a psychologist. So, I'd maintain that people being able to grow or forage their own psilocybe mushrooms is unlikely to be a problem for psychiatrists providing psilocybin-assisted therapy. If mycological nerds in forests or a monotub hidden in a closet are going to derail your multi-billion dollar plans, then maybe your business model needs some work!
Marketing, Psychedelics, and Ethics
Ok, so this piece was a bit of a trick and ended up being as much (or more) about ethics as psychedelic marketing. Nonetheless, I hope it still illustrates why the 4 Ps, plus prohibition, are crucial to an extensive range of psychedelic products, ideas, and even whole psychedelic movements. For psychedelics, every one of the 4 Ps is impacted by the War on Drugs. So long as prohibition is with us, we need to factor the 5th p into how we achieve our goals, just as much as we do with the other four.
Do you need unique blog or web content for your psychedelic business that is fit for purpose, accurate, ethical, and engaging? If you do, please reach out!
