How much is really spent on demand reduction
The piece starts from a blunt observation: most money “to save the rhino” goes into fences, rangers, and equipment, and only a thin slice touches demand for horn at all.
Even inside that slice, the author argues, very little qualifies as genuine demand reduction. Donors are told they are funding “behavior change” campaigns, but much of what is financed would be more accurately described as general awareness or broad education. The result is a mismatch between what funders think they are buying and what actually reaches the people using horn.
“Only a relatively small percentage is spent in demand reduction campaigns, and only a small fraction of that can be classed as demand reduction at all.”
Four types of campaigns, one that hits behavior
To clear the ground, Breaking The Brand puts forward a simple typology:
- Awareness raising: messages that make the public broadly aware that rhinos are in trouble.
- Education: information about rhinos, poaching and laws, often aimed at wide audiences.
- Belief-challenging campaigns that start to question myths and status narratives around horn.
- Well-targeted behavior change: tightly focused interventions that speak to actual users and trigger them to stop using the to actual users and trigger them to stop using horn within a time frame that matters for wild populations.
Only the last category counts as demand reduction in the author’s eyes. A poster in an airport, or a general anti‑poaching documentary, may be useful in other ways but will not shift the behavior of a small, wealthy user group in Hanoi or Guangzhou.
The key test proposed is sharp: will this campaign induce heavy health anxiety, status anxiety, or a sense of status gain from quitting, in real users, today?
Why mislabelling campaigns is dangerous
The argument is not academic. One concern is political. If governments and NGOs walk into CITES meetings claiming that “billions” have been spent on demand reduction and then admit that poaching has not fallen, they hand an easy talking point to lobbyists who want legal trade in horn.
Pro‑trade groups already point to the lack of visible impact from widely advertised campaigns as proof that “demand reduction does not work.” Inflated or sloppy accounting of what counts as demand reduction makes that line harder to challenge. The text warns that thin data and over‑promising on impact risk shape treaty debates in favor of trade experiments.
Another concern is about donor expectations. When funders are told their money is going into behavior change and later see little evidence of users quitting, trust erodes. Organizations may struggle to admit that what they ran were awareness projects rather than true demand‑side interventions, and future funding can dry up.
“If parties go to the 2016 CITES meeting saying millions have been spent on demand reduction and reports of impact say it is not working, it plays into the hands of those wishing to legalize trade.”
What actually motivates users to stop
The latter part of the piece draws on interviews with primary horn users, conducted since 2013, to identify what might truly change their behavior. It identifies three main levers:
- Health risk: credible fear that using horn could harm their own health or that of someone important to them.
- Status and legal risk: fear that using horn could damage their status through public exposure or lead to serious legal consequences such as jail.
- Status gain from quitting: the possibility that stopping would grant access to a higher status group or signal modernity and sophistication.
Campaigns that do not speak directly to these motives, in the right language and through the right channels for elite users, are unlikely to shift demand within the time frame that matters for rhinos in the wild. General appeals to compassion or biodiversity loss, while morally important, barely register in this calculus.
The piece pushes practitioners to ask a simple question of each campaign: would this make a heavy user feel worried enough about health or status, or proud enough of quitting, to stop buying horn now?
