Melbourne Business School's adjunct professor cites the "brilliant" work of advertising professor, John Phillip Jones in Harvard Business Review  30 years ago, for lessons that today's crop of booming US marijuana brand owners should heed in their race for branded supremacy.

• Ritson argues remarkably coherently for his tribulations sampling US pot brands that not much has changed in applied marketing in three decades; he lays down how and why a small number of billion dollar weed brands will ultimately win in the battle royale for dominance in the US market (state jurisdictions are increasingly legalising medical and recreational marijuana).
• Ritson resurfaces vintage and modern marketing evidence proving bigger brands today still hold or grow their marketshare far more efficiently than smaller brands and can spend disproportionately less (on marketing) than their marketshare threshold. It's because...they're bigger brands. Ipso facto, smaller brands have to spend more than their marketshare to retain or grow sales. 
• Only three or four national pot brands are likely to dominate the future American market – one brand is already estimated to be worth billions. "In these next few years the winners will emerge and the losers will go up in smoke," he says.
• There are exceptions, acknowledges Ritson, but always in the minority.  "We talk too much about disruption in marketing," he writes. "We focus on the shiny new brands and assume that the barriers to entry are low. In new categories like electric vehicles or home automation it might apply. But in most mature categories the story of brand supremacy is an incredibly boring one." (Refer to the earlier point).

• The reason is the "fundamental unfairness of marketing. While we pride ourselves on the battle of small things against big, the reality of branded competition is that it is a casino that gives its high rollers incredibly better odds than the small punters."

• Ritson's crisp advice for the hundreds of marijuana brands currently doubling sales as a category each month, is over-invest now in marketing to grow larger and faster than their rival brands. "Get to the top of the mountain in the next few years of frenzied competition and your advertising will work better for you because your scale will enable it," he puffs.