What If We Imagined Brands As Trees?

Branding and marketing have dark histories – ones rooted in consumerism, colonialism, flawed ideas of ownership, and white supremacy. Most traditional frameworks of branding, even those designed specifically for social impact organizations, often borrow more than they realize from the corporate contexts from which they derive. What does a truly regenerative brand strategy framework look like? What do brand and marketing offer the world, when stripped of their capitalist context? How might we position brands as true reciprocal members of a community?

As is often my first response when confronted with sticky questions like these, I turn to Nature. And when I consulted with Nature on this topic (by which I mean, stared dreamily out my office window), I received a simple answer. Imagine brands as trees.

It felt too basic at first, but the more I allowed myself to fully explore the metaphor, the deeper I found it to be. This was as good an answer as any to my complicated set of questions.

Roots

When we think of each brand as a tree, we innately understand that no tree would be able to grow without an extensive root network. Brands rely on a root network too, which I’ve come to understand as a deeply held set of values that guide decision-making – values that really are larger than the work itself, values that guide an entire life cycle. The roots of a brand connect it meaningfully to a community of aligned peers and audiences. Without a defined set of values, it’s hard for a brand (however small) to find the right ecosystems to grow within; to find its people and enter into a reciprocal relationship with them.

Trunk

Moving up from the roots, a trunk is the sturdy base that holds up a tree’s being. It is an essential part of a tree’s aliveness, a core way that people identify and differentiate different types of trees. For brands, we might think of a trunk as comprising their specific mission, their differentiators, services, and personality. This element is at the heart of who a brand is; it’s the connector between the deeper roots and the more external branches. A trunk is always growing and can always grow in new directions. These elements of a brand often appear fixed or solid when creating a brand strategy, but like a tree trunk, usually need to adapt, evolve, and expand over time to adapt to the realities of the work and the world around them.

Branches

A tree reaches out into its community through its branches, offering shelter, food, flowers, and fertilizer to the ecosystem it finds itself within. For brands, I see branches as marketing or communications. All the ways a brand puts itself out into the world. I find this part of the metaphor particularly powerful because it reminds us that the ideas and content that a brand offers via its marketing need to be aligned with knowledge about your audience. What are the ideas that the folks in your ecosystem turn to you/your brand for? Without this knowledge, your brand runs the risk of offering fruits no one in that ecosystem wants to eat. You create marketing that contributes to the noise. With knowledge of your ecosystem, however, your brand can create content that actually nourishes the deep needs of your community. The perfect nectar for the resident hummingbirds. Content like this cuts through our saturated online channels and delivers real value and methods of genuine connection.

In the forest

Zooming out a level, when we imagine brands as trees within a forest we position them not as singular entities in zero sum competition with their peers but as members of an ecosystem where their own flourishing is connected to that of the entire habitat. When we think of brands as trees, we see that brand communication and marketing needs to be community-based to be effective – that the ideas a brand shares nourish their community, and in turn that their community nourishes them by engaging with their ideas and, hopefully, deepening their work with your brand.