🐟 How Rebranding a Fish Could Save the Great Lakes

Sometimes I can become disillusioned with branding. Branding usually helps sell stuff. Whether or not the stuff benefits the people buying it can be a mixed bag.

But what if branding could directly benefit an ecosystem?

Asian carp, introduced to Arkansas in the 1970s as a non-chemical way to clean water in aquafarms, has become an invasive species causing extensive damage to Midwest waterways and threatening native ecosystems and wildlife.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources hired the (really rad) creative studio Span to rebrand Asian carp to encourage people to eat this nutritious and delicious fish, already commonly consumed in Asia. Now the fish is known as "copi."

This is so effing cool.

Most branding projects aim to change the way people think and feel about a company so that they’ll buy that company’s product or service.

This branding project aims to change the way people think and feel about a piece of our environmental fabric so that an environmental problem AND a human problem (hunger) is solved.

It’s a regenerative solution with branding at its heart.

The IDNR could have intervened in copi’s proliferation in so many other physical or chemical ways, inadvertently causing more damage to the environment. But instead of molding anything in the physical world to our desires, they’re changing another thing that’s farther (ahem) upstream: perception.