After coming home from a long day at work, people have different ways of winding down: a yoga class, a nap or, for many, a glass of wine.
Less common, though, is a cup of kratom tea – a beverage made from the kratom, or Mitragyna speciosa, tree that can serve as a sedative or stimulant, depending on the dosage.
However, kratom and kava bars have been on the rise in recent years, often serving as “a place to work, kind of like a third living room,” according to Dallas Vasquez, founder and CEO of kratom and kava beverage brand Mitra9. The company derives its name from mitragynine, the alkaloid that it distills from the kratom plant to use in its drinks.
(Mitra9 also sells kava beverages, which are distilled from an evergreen shrub called Piper methysticum and known for their relaxation properties – but that one apparently didn’t lend itself as well to pithy brand names.)
Along with their rise in popularity, however, has come a rise in concern, especially since some alkaloids in the kratom plant act on opioid receptors.
It’s a tricky industry to be in, since much of the potential market may have never heard of the product, and another sect is concerned about safety issues. But Vasquez says that’s why Mitra9’s core marketing strategy revolves around education and transparency about what their beverages do and how they’re developed.
The best way to connect with its audience and build trust, he said, is “just being an open book.”
Vasquez spoke with AdExchanger about the company’s marketing strategy.
AdExchanger: What got you interested in kratom and kava in the first place?
DALLAS VASQUEZ: In 2019, someone asked me to go to a kava bar, and I had no idea what it was.
I loved the effect. I loved that it was a gathering place where there was no alcohol. I stopped drinking alcohol about that same time period, right before 2020, and was looking for an alternative, so that caught my attention.
Even before Covid, but especially post-Covid, kava bars were really emerging in Florida as a place to work, kind of like a third living room, if you will.
I’ve definitely seen kratom and kava bars getting more attention in recent years – but you don’t hear much about off-the-shelf cans you can buy at the store. How did you get into that market?
One day, I just didn’t want to go to a kava bar, and I was a bit frustrated that I couldn’t buy the product already canned anywhere. That really made me look into what products are in market.
I found out something I didn’t expect, which was that there was a very robust market, but it just happened to be in two-ounce shots that are in every smoke shop in the country.
So that told me the market existed, or that there was demand for the ingredient and the product. The non-alcoholic space is picking up. There’s a big tidal wave of folks who aren’t drinking, and this seemed to match that kind of future.
So we started investigating how we could can the product, which took about a year, and we started canning products in late 2021.
Why do you think the product was only being sold as shots, rather than full-size beverages?
The technology to extract the product from the leaf to make it taste good just wasn’t there yet. These shots are awful. They’re barely drinkable.
Mitra9 is based on extracts, so you can extract the thing that you want out of the plant so that it’s odorless and tasteless. You can make a good-tasting product around it and deliver consistent dosage.
Our core product is a ready-to-drink 12-ounce beverage, so it has to taste good. It can’t taste good “for what it is.” It has to taste good, period.
I’m guessing a lot of the channels you advertise on have pretty strict content regulations. How does that affect where you advertise? Do you only do direct buys, or are you also using programmatic?
We do both, and programmatic is absolutely more restrictive.
Our products cannot be sold on certain platforms, so we really have to make sure we’re delivering the right message, and that everything’s in compliance with whatever outlet we’re trying to advertise through.
On top of the ad channels, a lot of consumers are skeptical of the product, too. How do you address that in your marketing?
In any emerging category, transparency does more work than hype.
And since it’s still an emerging category, we don’t have a map. Consumers probably don’t know what the product is. They don’t know why they need it or might want to use it. They don’t even know which claims to trust.
So, before you compete for preference, you have to earn a customer’s understanding.
Because these products were in all smoke shops, we went the same way when we first started. But, as the company evolved and progressed, our distribution partners started to change.
We were quickly moving into convenience stores and gas stations, and that changed the way we had to do things – we stopped treating education and marketing as two different things.
If someone doesn’t understand what they’re looking at, there’s no amount of marketing that’s going to matter. They’re gonna leave before the message has an opportunity to resonate, so education became part of the brand in itself, like understanding why they should respect the brand and why they might use this ingredient.
On our website, we have lot of codes and batch testing, just like the dietary supplement industry does. We have links to certificates of analysis that you can look at that show all the things that we’re testing for. It shows how many times we tested the product at raw material, post-extraction and post-finished product. We do a lot of testing to make sure the product’s safe and what it should be.
What is the core message that you want to make sure your consumers understand, and how do you incorporate it into your marketing?
We lean on clear product information like honest answers, transparency and consistent messaging.
Our whole aim is making sure that someone experiences what they thought they were going to experience.
A low dose of kratom gives more of an energetic feeling. Whereas, if you were to consume a large amount of kratom, you would likely get a more relaxed, chill feeling. But that’s what we use kava for.
Our messaging is really something that is meant for kind of a social tonic or part of a ritualistic experience, like having your coffee in the morning. We’re not really competing with coffee. We’re not really competing with alcohol; I think the THC space has done that. We’re trying to compete in our own space as a functional beverage, and we talk a lot about mood, specifically mood enhancement.
We try to meet people at the intersection of social and rituals.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
