Emphasizing product attributes signaling quality through commonly accepted standards have been at the core of marketing messages in a variety of different industries such as hospitality, automotive, ecommerce and wine marketing. Establishing quality signals for an offering previously considered illicit has become the challenge for marketers upon the legalization of adult cannabis consumption in a growing number of US states, and several countries such as Canada and Mexico. The existence of a cannabis consumption culture during its prohibition provides the opportunity for marketers to use available customer input, while establishing quality signals anew. As this co-creation process unfolds, we aim to understand how quality signals can be (and are being) established in the cannabis market, by exploring consumer-generated content on a web platform.

Simply, we propose a typology of quality signals, adopting Orth and Krška’s (2002) conceptualization of product attributes. We test the proposed types by conducting text analysis first. Next, we try to answer, if these quality signals are co-created by comparing company- vs. customer-created content and the interchange in the discourse. Once completed, we foresee contributions to the literature on customer co-creation of quality signals, and inform the practitioners of cannabis marketing in their messaging and positioning strategies.