Amarula is a South African liquor made of sugar, cream, and the fruit from the marula tree.

I attended secondary school in Africa and this brand and the iconic amarula elephant are well known. Sadly, so is the ever-increasing concern over elephant conservation.

Much of my childhood was spent seeing these majestic creatures and my desire for them to roam across Africa forever more is probably why this campaign is so special to me.

They have done some amazing campaigns over the years to help support the conservation work of elephants who grace the front of the bottles. I think they are a fantastic example of CSR being done in a way that is done in a way that is relevant to their brand and therefore does not appear tokenistic.

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Label Design

My favourite campaign of theirs was ‘Don’t let them disappear’ where they removed the iconic elephant from the labels in an attempt to raise awareness that soon elephants would be gone. I thought it was so simple but so powerful.

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Ice Sculpture

Amarula Canada also created a life-sized elephant ice sculpture who they personified and he told the story of the elephants struggle live on Twitter.

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Name them, Save them

Phase One, an on-line effort that allowed an international audience to visit a digital African savannah where they could design and name a virtual African elephant. Participants could then share their named elephant with friends and fellow conservationists as a means of raising awareness to the plight of these intelligent and magnificent animals. To date, over 500,000 elephant-lovers from around the world have visited Amarula’s digital African savannah – a number greater than the actual population of African elephants currently living in the wild.

In Phase Two, the digitalised elephants created by the cream liqueur’s online audience are brought to life by putting a named elephant and information regarding the animal on the labels of 400,000 individualised Amarula bottles – one bottle for each of the earth’s remaining African elephants. Amarula will be showcasing a number of these one-of-a-kind bottles at IAADFS before they are distributed to Amarula markets around the world.

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The relationship between Amarula & Elephants

The fruit from the marula tree is also a favourite of elephants (and monkeys) and there is a myth that they eat enough fermented fruit so that they can be left feeling a little intoxicated!

However as elephants eat the fruit, bark and branches of the tree and help to distribute the seeds they are heavily associated with the tree in Africa.