It’s a noisy frontier, full of confusing rules and messages. There’s no definitive playbook for the thousands of retail dispensaries — or, for that matter, for the marketers tasked with selling gummies, beverages, edibles, lotions, patches and old-fashioned smokable weed, among tens of thousands of other cannabis products. As for fledgling brands targeting patients with specific medical benefits or plain old general wellness, the scene is more baffling still.

Marketers aren’t exactly embracing the chaos, but they’ve accepted it. “When it comes to brand maturity in the healthcare space, we are in the very earliest phases,” says Holistic Industries chief marketing officer Kyle Barich, who is trying to turn brands such as Cannaceutica and Garcia Hand Picked into household names. “We don’t know who will be the whales and who will be the guppies.”