The Future of Marketing is Fungal
“Mycelium is a way of life that challenges our understanding of intelligence, individuality, and communication.”
— Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life
While we’re still trying to make sense of likes, clickthroughs, and the algorithm, the forest floor has been quietly humming with a much older system of influence — a decentralised network of fungal threads, whispering in electric pulses beneath our feet.
And here’s the kicker: they might be using up to 50 words to do it.
The “50-Word Language” of Fungi
In 2022, computer scientist Andrew Adamatzky discovered that fungi emit electrical spikes that resemble structured language. Not noise. Not chaos. Patterns. Signals. Meaning. Using statistical linguistics — the same methods used to analyse machine code and human speech — he found up to 50 distinct “words” in their spike trains. In other words, fungi talk. And they may be saying more than we ever imagined.
Not with syntax. With context. With memory. With ecological intent.
From Mycelium to Marketing
What if brand communication took inspiration from this? Fungi don’t broadcast. They interface. They don’t shout over the noise. They grow through it.
They:
Sense their environment
Connect symbiotically with other species
Exchange nutrients and information
Store memory in their networks
Expand only where conditions are fertile
Compare that to modern marketing:
A/B tests instead of sensing
Blasts instead of symbiosis
Shallow optimisation over nutrient exchange
Algorithmic spam over cultural memory
We’re still trying to win attention when we should be earning entanglement.
The Attention Economy Is Overgrown
Social media is already a mycelial substrate — decentralised, interwoven, fertile one moment and hostile the next. Users aren’t nodes to target. They’re ecosystems to collaborate with.
In this fungal metaphor:
The brand is the mycelium
The message is the electric pulse
The consumer is not the target — they’re the tree, the root, the co-evolving species
Toward Fungal Marketing Models
Imagine a marketing ecosystem that:
Listens before it speaks (like mycelium sensing nutrients before growing)
Connects below the surface (dark social, group chats, community DMs)
Shares value to build trust (symbiotic content over clickbait)
Stores brand memory in emotional mycelium (cultural resonance, not performance metrics)
It’s not growth hacking. It’s growth behaving. { Imagine that!}
A New Lexicon for Marketers
Forget the funnel. Forget the flywheel. The next marketing playbook may sound more like:
Mycorrhizal resonance
Spore-based virality
Fungal semiotics
Entangled audiences
Symbiotic loyalty loops
And instead of viral... we go mycelial.
Final Spores
Fungi aren’t here to win. They’re here to weave. If your brand strategy is built on dominance and extraction, it’s already outdated. The future isn’t about being louder. It’s about being more entangled. In an overstimulated world of infinite content and zero attention, the brands that thrive will be the ones that listen like fungi, grow with intent, and disappear into the roots of culture — only to bloom again when the moment is right.
