About the Award

The “Building Nature’s Brand” (a.k.a. The Brandy) award recognizes unique contributions made in using marketing tools to increase public engagement and achieve conservation goals. The award seeks to honor conservationists (e.g., scientists, practitioners), whose work furthers the mission of SCB—advancing the science and practice of conserving Earth’s biological diversity—through the application of marketing tools.

The award is given to one or more individuals for a single conservation action or for an entire body of work (i.e., a series of linked contributions). Winners are decided by the ConsMark Award Committee, based on the following criteria:

• Significant contribution to conservation and public engagement with special focus on efforts
  that use the basic concepts and tools of marketing
• Contributions to the advancement and support of conservation marketing
• A track record of successfully developing and applying conservation marketing concepts to engagement
• Successes achieved through innovation and unconventional collaborations
• A professional conduct guided by inclusivity, diversity and respect

Recipients of the Brandy Award

2018: Paul Butler is recognized for his extraordinary leadership in bringing marketing strategies to the field of biodiversity conservation and applying them on the ground to produce change in human behavior.

It was Paul’s vision that showed conservation scientists and practitioners how using methods most commonly used by businesses to sell products could also be used to reduce threats to biodiversity worldwide. He worked on projects all over the world to refine his methods and develop what today is the Pride method used by Rare, the NGO that Paul still has a key role in today and which continues to be one of the leaders in the field of behavior change for biodiversity. Paul not only directed the first Pride campaign himself, he was the mastermind behind most of the Pride campaigns carried out by Rare in the 1980’s and 1990’s, moving afterwards into a more strategic role as Senior VP and board member.

Paul Butler has been remarkable in his emphasis on local capacity building, placing diversity and inclusion at the heart of his work. Through Rare’s Pride program, and now through the Campaigning for Conservation training program Paul developed, he plays an active role in the training of hundreds of local conservation practitioners in dozens of developing countries around the world. It is through this process he achieves local empowerment that ensures long term sustainability of behavior change efforts, something that is key in successful environmental conservation programs.

2016: Angelique Hjarding is the winner of the first ever ConsMark Building Nature’s Brand Award. Angelique received The Brandy Award at the Society’s 2016 North America Congress for Conservation Biology (NACCB 2016) in July 2016 in Madison, Wisconsin,  USA. Angelique founded the Butterfly Highway project, a grassroots pollinator habitat program of the North Carolina Wildlife Federation.