Marketing Products With Wildlife: How to Make It Benefit Conservation

Abstract

A key obstacle to wildlife conservation is a scarcity of funding. A recent paper [Courchamp, F., Jaric, I., Albert, C., Meinard, Y., Ripple, W. J., and Chapron, G. (2018). The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals. PLoS Biol. 16:e2003997. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2003997] illustrates how for-profit businesses' widespread use of threatened wildlife imagery could create complacency in the public about their conservation. A wildlife imagery royalty, whereby businesses that use threatened wildlife in their marketing pay a small percentage of their sales to the conservation of those species could be revolutionary for conservation funding. However, businesses are not currently compelled to support the protection of the species espoused in their products. We build upon the arguments presented by recent publications [Good, C., Burnham, D., and Macdonald, D. W. (2017). A cultural conscience for conservation. Animals 7:52. doi: 10.3390/ani7070052; Courchamp, F., Jaric, I., Albert, C., Meinard, Y., Ripple, W. J., and Chapron, G. (2018). The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals. PLoS Biol. 16:e2003997. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2003997] to explore limitations and a number of key pathways that may help bring a wildlife imagery royalty to fruition.