Toward Pluriversal and Regenerative Brand Meaning Systems as Infrastructures for Strategic Making

Debates around sustainability and regeneration in craft, design, and innovation frequently foreground materials, circular systems, and technology, while overlooking the strategic brand meaning systems that shape what organisations make and why. This paper examines brand strategy as an upstream lever for regenerative change, focusing on the limitations of archetypal branding and its universalist, anthropocentric assumptions.

Adopting a conceptual synthesis and exploratory scoping approach, the study brings decolonial theory, regenerative design, and brand strategy into conversation. It examines how popularised Jungian archetypes can privilege Western epistemologies and considers alternatives grounded in relationality, multiplicity, place-responsiveness, and ecological interdependence.

Three implications emerge. First, universalist archetypal models risk reproducing a singular epistemic centre. Second, pluriversality provides a conceptual condition for regenerative branding, challenging the application of regenerative language to extractive systems. Third, the Multiplayer Brand offers a point of departure for exploring how participatory approaches might support more plural and emergent forms of brand meaning, though participation alone does not ensure regeneration. These tensions lead to four conditions for regenerative brand meaning systems: dynamic rather than static, relational rather than individual, place-based rather than universal, and regenerative rather than extractive.

The paper argues that sustainable making requires attention to sustainable meaning-making upstream. These conditions shift attention from sustainability as an aesthetic or communicative layer towards the role of brand strategy in shaping organisational purpose, priorities, and the decisions about what is made and valued.