872 | People and Nature. 2020;2:872–876. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pan3 DOI: 10.1002/pan3.10171 CONSUMING WILDLIFE – MANAGING DEMAND FOR PRODUCTS IN THE WILDLIFE TRADE Editorial Influencing consumer demand is vital for tackling the illegal wildlife trade Diogo Veríssimo 1,2,3 | Michael 't Sas-Rolfes 3 | Jenny A. Glikman 2,4 1 Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 2 Institute for Conservation Research, San Diego Zoo Global, Escondido, CA, USA 3 Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK 4 Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC), Córdoba, Spain Correspondence Diogo Veríssimo Email: verissimodiogo@gmail.com 1 | INTRODUCTION Consumer demand is an integral part of any market system, and the markets involving wildlife products are no exception ('t Sas-Rolfes et al., 2019). Tackling the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) for the benefit of biodiversity conservation requires understanding and influencing consumer demand (Veríssimo et al., 2020). While demand reduc- tion activities are increasing (Veríssimo & Wan, 2019), they remain poorly funded, with only 6% of the funds committed globally to re- duce IWT focused on consumer demand (World Bank Group, 2016). This lack of investment is also reflected in the knowledge base, with limited research focused on understanding the drivers of consumer demand for illegal wildlife products, and the existing knowledge focused largely on a few species of birds and mammals (Margulies et al., 2019). We hope the Consuming wildlife – managing demand for wildlife products special feature can showcase the different types of research needed to start filling this gap. 2 | WHAT IS DEMAND? Demand reduction interventions have frequently been criticized for having nebulous goals, aggravated by uncertainty about what con- sumer demand actually is (Greenfield & Veríssimo, 2019; Olmedo et al., 2018). This uncertainty is somewhat justified as the defini- tion of demand has varied across disciplines and with time. In clas- sical economics, market demand is typically conceptualized in two dimensions, a consumer desire in the form of willingness and ability to pay for given quantities of particular goods or services across a range of potential prices, generating the well-known law of demand (Marshall, 2009). However, this conceptualization treats demand simply as a se- ries of discrete quantitative decision-making points expressed as a function of market prices, rather than as a complete decision-making process. This process has been formalized through marketing models such as the Purchase Funnel (Jansen & Schuster, 2011), which de- scribes purchases as a series of multiple cognitive stages that consum- ers go through as they decide whether and what product or service they want to purchase. While there have been different formulations of this model, one that has been used in the context of wildlife trade divides the purchase process into four stages: Awareness, Research, Preference and Purchase (Veríssimo et al., 2019; Figure 1). Furthermore, the classical economic view of demand potentially obscures the fact that there are constraints other than market price that may preclude consumers who are willing to make a purchase from executing that action. One way to think about these constraints is by detailing the different types of factors that shape consumer de- mand. Kotler and Armstrong (2010) describe the diverse constraints influencing consumers (Figure 2), which may come in many forms and be internal or external to the consumer her/himself. To deal with such complexity in the understanding of con- sumer demand from a marketing perspective, the concept of la- tent demand was created. Kotler (1973) extended it to instances where a consumer would desire a product, the existence of which This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2020 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society