Posts in the News Category

Over the last couple of years, Breaking The Brand has fielded many questions about our adverts using negative messaging and emotions. Since the launch of our campaigns we have had people in the rhino conservation space tell us what we do is ‘too hard hitting’, ‘racist’ and ‘would offend our donors’. I mentioned more about this in our Second Year Report: http://breakingthebrand.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Breaking-The-Brand-Project-Second-Annual-Report.pdf

Similarly, there is a belief in many circles that all messages should be positive, don’t upset people, people only learn and change when they are positively engaged. This mindset is pervasive; it is also naïve and just plain wrong. If this were true, then from a media perspective why don’t anti-smoking adverts show happy people playing with their children and saying “I have much more energy to play with my kids because I don’t smoke” or road safety adverts with drivers saying “Home again safe and sound because I don’t drink and drive”?

Do you think such adverts would reduce the smoking rate or the incidences of drinking and driving? Do you think such adverts would have worked? No, me neither. The reality is, some people are motivated into changing their behaviour for positive reasons, but many need to feel discomfort to trigger them into action to do something different. This is used in the media to great effect. I write more about this in Discomfort Triggers Behaviour Change.

Over the last 18 months, I have spoken to several people in the anti-tobacco, road safety and work safety space. I believe that there is a wealth of empirical evidence to show that ‘negative’ campaigns will trigger behaviour change, if employed for the right audiences. In fact, one of the world’s leading researchers in the anti-smoking field stated “Negative ads do the grunt work of stopping smoking, positive ads keep our donors happy”.

So, I ask you to spent 30 minutes watching some adverts and see what you think. Make a note of the time line:

Road Safety

The Victorian Transport Accident Commission first created public service adverts to deal with the rising road toll in 1989. In that year the lives lost on Victorian roads totaled 776.

20 years on, a compilation of these adverts was used in their Christmas campaign to help keep the road toll down over the holidays. Title: Everybody Hurts

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With one day to go before the start of CoP17, below is a reflection and comment on some of the articles and submissions I have read leading up to the CITES meeting.

While there is much in the Time Magazine article (featured on the left) to like – it is one of the best I have seen – it also misses a couple of critical points about why Viet Nam’s (illegal) trade in rhino horn hasn’t been closed down sooner.

The Vietnamese Government’s demonstrated lack of commitment to close down the demand for and the trafficking of rhino horn cannot be decoupled from the fact that a future legalised international trade has not been decisively ruled out.

Yes, Viet Nam already has a legal obligation to seek out and prosecute traffickers and consumers. And, at the same time, over the years people in Viet Nam have told me that the South African Government’s pro-trade agenda plays a key role in slowing the Vietnamese Government’s response to tackling the trade and consumption on the demand side.

Like it or not, this should not be a surprise; why would any government target its high net worth citizens, who are the primary users of rhino horn, when:

1. These are the business people and entrepreneurs driving Viet Nam’s rapid economic growth and
2. What they are doing could be made legal if the South African Government can keep the possibility of trade on the table.

In addition, there has been no ground swell against trade from many of the institutions CITES and world governments turn to for advice on these matters.

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As Breaking The Brand’s supporters know, our focus is demand reduction for rhino horn. This focus remains, but as a result of the recent elephant census we decided to demonstrate the type of campaign we could create to target just one group of ivory consumers.

Ivory Buyers in China

On page 26 of Breaking The Brand’s second annual report, published in April 2015: http://breakingthebrand.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Breaking-The-Brand-Project-Second-Annual-Report.pdf I mentioned reading an article in Virgin Australia’s Voyeur magazine which stated: Nouveau riche around the world are realising that opulent displays of wealth doesn’t necessarily bestow class or taste. The solution? Etiquette classes with royal protocol expert William Hanson who is teaching wealthy Chinese women everything from ‘pastry skills’ to ‘how to be the perfect host’.

This provides insight in to the level of ‘status anxiety’ and a fear of being rejected by the people you aspire to and, as a result, could be used in creating demand reduction campaigns to tackle buyers of ivory and rhino horn in China. There have been articles throughout 2015 and 2016 about this topic including:

http://www.traveller.com.au/chinese-tourists-behaviour-how-shanghais-wealthy-are-improving-their-etiquette-ghnhxs and http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20150219-the-latest-chinese-status-symbol  These are not the only example that provide an insight in to how to tackle the Chinese buyers of ivory and rhino horn, but they are very useful.

Same old, same old

So when we have this and plenty of other research and evidence on how to create genuine demand reduction campaigns, why do the large conservation agencies continue to regurgitate the same old campaign strategies that haven’t worked to-date?

Cross arms for elephants		Link fingers for elephants		Tie knots for elephants

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If the Strategy Doesn’t Work, Change the Strategy

More and more people are questioning the lack of success of the sustainable use of wildlife model. Similarly, many are examining the policies of large conservation bodies which use trade to minimize human-wildlife conflict with the aim to save wildlife and natural environments: http://africageographic.com/blog/sustainable-utilisation-of-wildlife-not-so-sustainable/

After decades of these policies, we are losing wildlife in staggering numbers, natural environments at alarming rates and little has been done to address poverty. Why are we still talking about legalizing trade in endangered species and betting on a prescription that has failed over-and-over again?

The conservation sector has not been able to halt or reverse over exploitation of resources. Dominant neoliberal ideology insists on free markets and free trade, but doesn’t care about the consequences for ecosystems and choses to ignore the fact that ultimately we are dependent on them. Yet in search of funding the largest conservation charities have aligned themselves with governments (which are their biggest donors) and large business; are they unable to change now because they are trapped within the system? It’s time to ask, is there another way and what could be an alternative? [Read more…]

Breaking The Brand is delighted to have a guest blogger, Caroline Bertin. Caroline is a supporter of and donor to Breaking The Brand. Caroline is based in the UK and we were delighted that she headed along to the rhino horn pro-trade/no-trade debate, presented earlier this month. John Hume, South Africa’s largest private rhino breeder put forward the pro-argument while Will Travers, CEO of the Born Free Foundation presented the opposing view. This blog presents the observations of someone who has invested their time in understanding this complex issue, she recently spent time volunteering at TRAFFIC in Hanoi. Like so many, Caroline wants to believe there is a light at the end of the tunnel for rhinos and a way to save these magnificent animals from extinction in the wild. Here are Caroline’s observations from the event……     [Read more…]

Breaking The Brand is now only weeks away from the launch of RhiNo Campaign 4. July 2016 saw the final publication from RhiNo Campaign 3 – What does a wildlife criminal look like?

Status Anxiety

Launched on the 4th January 2016, this was the first Breaking The Brand campaign aimed at triggering ‘status anxiety’ in the primary users. Since starting our interviews, with the primary users of rhino horn in 2013, status anxiety – if using rhino horn would diminish user’s status in the eyes of their peers – was one of only two reasons given that would cause this group to stop using rhino horn quickly enough to save the rhino from extinction in the wild.

As with Breaking The Brand’s two previous campaigns, over 80% of our adverts target businessmen, the remaining targeted affluent women; often the wives of the businessmen buyers/users.

The adverts asked: What does a wildlife criminal look like? and highlighted to people that if they had bought rhino horn recently it will have come from an illegal killed rhino.

Triggering status anxiety is not the same as triggering the fear of law enforcement. The approach taken in the ads is to diminish the businessman’s reputation in the eyes of his peers and the networks people he aspires to be a part of. Like all businessmen around the world, our target group is worried about the loss of their brand and reputation, and any resulting loss of career and business opportunities.

The advert also pointed to the fact that while in the past the focus had been on the poachers and traffickers of rhino horn, now more and more people are paying attention to the buyers. Given that the rhinos’ destruction is driven by the target groups desire to purchase rhino horn, the buyers must see themselves for what they are, wildlife criminals. The advert finishes with: If you buy rhino horn, you are a wildlife criminal. [Read more…]

As many of you know, I have long asked the people who believe in legalising the international trade in rhino horn to produce their business case and user analysis. The reason I have asked these questions is that since I started interviewing the primary users of rhino horn, driving the current rhino killing spree, it became apparent straight away that they don’t see horn from a farmed rhino as a substitute product.

I wrote about this in: http://breakingthebrand.org/farmed-rhino-horn-not-seen-as-substitute-product/ As I say in the blog: When I was in South Africa earlier this year (Feb 2015) all my meetings clearly showed that very few people understood the nature of the demand or the users of genuine rhino horn. This is obviously very concerning since the South African government appears to be actively pursuing a trade legalisation agenda and they are creating risk-benefit models for pro/anti trade decisions based on incomplete information.

Yes, I heard that southern white rhinos are easy to farm “They are just like cows” one person said, “easy to manage, like dogs” said another. Significantly, not enough people are asking the right questions: “Whilst we know that horns can be harvested for sale, are these the rhino horns that the wealthy users, driving the poaching of wild rhinos, will want to buy? Are farmed horns a substitute product for horns from wild rhinos to the primary user groups?” BTB’s research has always indicated a farmed product is not seen as a substitute product by the wealthy Vietnamese elite who can afford to buy genuine, wild rhino horn. They are interested in the wild ‘product’ and so while the demand remains the poaching will continue.

When this blog was posted on some of the pro-trade social media groups the pro-trade response was as expected, ‘lobbying 101 techniques’ of deflection and counter-attack, but not answering very basic business case questions: http://breakingthebrand.org/pro-trade-response-to-blog/  My statement at the end of the blog “Obviously the lack of any useful response means that there is neither the willingness nor the ability on the pro-trade side to engage with the real aspects of the debate. Similarly, if the response is silence this is also be very telling!” may have triggered an email I received from some in the pro-trade community, pointing me to two pieces of information “I would like to recommend the following links”. http://za.zinio.com/reader.jsp?issue=416351493&o=ext “And please watch this video”: https://vimeo.com/135540882  and asking me “We are striving to make a rhino worth more alive than dead. Will you join us in this cause?” [Read more…]

As a kid in the UK in the 70’s and 80’s, I was addicted to nature TV, Animal Magic, Survival, Wildlife on One, Life on Earth, Johnny Morris, David Bellamy and David Attenborough. The emerging debates at the time about how people needed to protect the natural world and how you could and should take action resonated with me. In parallel with this came Anita Roddick, an activist, environmental campaigner and Founder of The Body Shop. Though I never quite forgave her for selling The Body Shop to L’Oréal, I continued to follow her work; her book Take It Personally: How to Make Conscious Choices to Change the World is another reason I started Breaking The brand.

So when it comes to demand reduction for wild animals how can we take it personally and why do we need to?

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Rhino Horn User Analysis and Pro-Trade/No-Trade Debate

As many of Breaking The Brand’s supporters know, I have long said that the pro-rhino-horn-trade proponents have no understanding of the current demand or users; I have not once seen any form of customer analysis, which I outlined in a previous blog post. Time and time again they have been asked to produce their user demand analysis and they haven’t; at least now they admit that they don’t understand the nature of the demand: https://www.rhinoalive.com/rhino-horn-trade-faq/(pro-trade website)

and highlight their gobsmacking belief, I quote from their website ‘The best way to learn about the market is to engage it via legal trade.’ Wow, what can you say to that ridiculous statement!

The reality is that they have an agenda and simply don’t care as long as there is a market or one can be manufactured. In another piece of pro-trade propaganda (https://vimeo.com/135540882), one of their go-to economists, Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes states ‘What they [rhino horns] are used for is hardly relevant. The fact is that people are willing to pay.’ So it won’t be a surprise that Michael is connected with PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center who are developing a ‘free market environmentalism (FME)’ model. From a wildlife perspective their publications have titles such as: If it pays, it stays. I’m sure you are getting the picture. [Read more…]

When you add up everything that is being spent to save the rhino from extinction in the wild, then it would become a teeny tiny fraction of 1%. The vast majority of the money donated to rhino conservation is spent on the ground on protection measures – fencing, rangers, equipment, dehorning etc. Only a relatively small percentage is spent in demand countries. Of that percentage, again only a small fraction goes into what can be classed as demand reduction campaigns.

Breaking The Brand Basic Definitions

As an introduction to this blog, I must qualify Breaking The Brand’s definition of what constitutes a demand reduction campaign: It is a campaign that elicits an emotional response in the current user groups to such a level that it triggers them to stop using rhino horn in a time frame that is useful to save the rhino from extinction in the wild. The diagram below summarizes our definition of 4 types of campaigns, namely

1. Awareness Raising
2. Education
3. Belief Challenging
4. Demand Reduction (Behaviour Change)

Why is this definition critical? There are several reasons, but for the sake of this blog, I will stick to three. [Read more…]