Taming “Wild Dogs” for a Good Cause

by Barry Silverstein—brandchannel.com (April 15, 2010)

Zimbabwe has many problems, including a wild dog population that’s in danger of extinction. But who wants to save an animal with a name like that, or a face that only its mother could love? The rebranding of the once-flourishing species is a great case study for brand marketers. Follow us into the bush as we track the critter’s trail as it seeks to shed its bad rap…

Dr. Gregory Rasmussen, a Brit who grew up in Zimbabwe, took a shine to the African canine, which doesn’t bark and shares little in common with a modern-day dog. With its habitat under threat and its numbers dwindling, Rasmussen came up with a new name – “painted dogs” – to reposition the mutt and win favor with animal-lovers.

Nicholas Kristof recounts how the perception change came about. Starting with a name change, Rasmussen coined the phrase “painted dogs” as an homage to the big-eared dogs’ spotted coats. More than two decades ago, he started the Painted Dog Conservation group to take care of injured animals, and realized he need to embark on a P.R. campaign to show rural villagers, who feared the dogs, that the painted dogs shouldn’t be perceived as an enemy.

Today he runs a children’s bush camp to educate students that painted dogs “don’t attack humans or prey much on livestock.” Rasmussen stresses how locals can actually “benefit from the dogs’ presence and gain incomes so that they won’t feel the need to poach wildlife.” In effect, Rasmussen is creating a conservation model for any endangered species.

As Rasmussen himself notes on his website, “with education and awareness programmes, (we’re) creating an environment whereby the dogs can move in status from ‘perceived pest’ to ‘best loved animal’.”

In an attempt to convince Zimbabweans to support the species’ conservation, he also incorporated folklore, “from African legends of witches that turn into hyenas, to the Berbers of North Africa, who believe that to kill a dog stains a human soul forever” and spread the word that “there is no record in myth or fact of a Painted Dog attacking or killing a human being. His latest battle addresses the international trade in painted dogs.

Kristof thinks it is Rasmussen’s successful rebranding of the dogs, along with his grassroots effort to involve local people in conservation, that “offers some useful lessons for do-gooders around the world… If clever marketing and strategic thinking can take reviled varmints such as ‘wild dogs’ and resurrect them (quite justly) as exotic ‘painted dogs’ to be preserved, then no cause is hopeless.”