The Fourth Spring

Last week, I sat down to do something I hadn't done for some time.

Not write a newsletter. Not pitch an idea. Not respond to a brief.

I sat down to write what I believe about brands. About teams. About what it takes to build something that lasts.

Preparation for news I'll be sharing later this week sent me there. And soon enough, I found myself digging through posts and articles I'd written nearly a decade ago. Specifically, one from August 2016, and came across my reflections about bamboo. Yes, bamboo.

I'd almost forgotten it existed.

Bamboo is one of the most useful materials on earth. Clothing. Utensils. Food. Scaffolding on high-rise buildings across Asia, preferred over steel for its strength-to-weight ratio and its flexibility in a typhoon. Reusable diapers. Construction materials. Quite extraordinary.

I wrote it after returning from five years in China and before embarking on what would become the 'Power of One' transformation within Publicis Groupe in a range of global leadership roles: the journey that took us from 4th to 1st on every meaningful metric in the marketing services industry. Reading it again today was a strange experience. But the framework I reached for then (a plant, of all things) still holds. In fact it holds more firmly now than it did when I wrote it.

Here's what bamboo taught me then. And what ten more years of transformation has added.

The thing about bamboo is that it looks like failure for three years.

You plant it. You water it. You come back in Spring and there's a frail green shoot. Barely visible. The next year, the same. A shoot so fragile you could snap it with a finger.

Then in the fourth Spring, it grows sixty centimetres a day. For sixty consecutive days, each new cane wider and stronger than the last. Thirty metres in two weeks. The fastest-growing woody plant on Earth.

What was happening in those three invisible years?

Everything.

The rhizome system was growing down and out, building the root infrastructure capable of supporting the explosion above. Without it, the canes would emerge and immediately fall over. The visible growth is only possible because of the invisible work that preceded it.

In 2016, I applied this to corporate transformation. You undertake a change programme, and for a period you have painful, uncomfortable change with almost nothing to show for it above the surface. During that period, the only honest thing you can do is identify the right chemistry, the right collaboration, the right ways of working, and celebrate it even when the results haven't arrived yet.

In 2026, I'd apply it more broadly. And more honestly.

I've watched brands skip the root system. Chase the green shoot. Invest in the visible expression of growth like unearned campaigns and activations and lazy line extensions without building the underlying structure that makes growth compound. And I've watched those canes fall over. Because there was nothing below the surface holding them up.

The briefest summary of marketing failure is this: we optimise for the visible season. We should be optimising for the invisible one.

Bamboo is not a single plant, it is a colony. A giant grass structurally dependent on the interdependence of its members. The tallest, strongest bamboo grows in the most collaborative colonies. Each cane supports the others. Attempt to grow a single cane in isolation and it falls.

The brands that have genuinely endured are colonies, not plants.

Some of the brands I've admired most from the outside have been in households for decades. Not because of a single brilliant campaign. Not because of a particularly insightful CMO at a particular moment. Because of the accumulated trust of consistent Springs. Season by season. Cane by cane.

What I've learned in marketing leadership roles at Coca-Cola, Nokia, Orange, and Unilever, and then in Publicis across dozens of client relationships, is that the colony metaphor remains the most honest one available.

You don't acquire brand equity. You earn it.

You protect it through consistency in the years when the visible metrics disappoint. You compound it when the root system is strong enough to sustain the upward growth. The failure mode (and I've had my fair share of those) is treating a colony as if it were a single plant. Demanding it perform like a launch. Pruning the root system to improve the quarterly numbers. Then wondering, two years later, why the canes are leaning.

The third lesson is about distribution.

Bamboo grows so rapidly because of how the canes expand like a telescope, each segment capable of its own cell division. The entire length of the cane drives growth simultaneously. It is not pushed from the root. It grows from everywhere at once.

Organisations that transform successfully operate the same way. Growth does not come from the centre pushing it outward. It comes from every team, every market, every segment taking genuine accountability for their piece and being genuinely empowered to deliver it.

This is harder than it sounds. Empowerment without accountability produces chaos. Accountability without empowerment produces resentment. The balance of trusting distributed teams to grow their segment while maintaining the coherent root system that connects them is the central challenge of leading marketing at scale.

I've seen it fail in both directions. Centres that refuse to let go, building the whole growth plan around their own conviction, slow the whole colony down. Distributed teams that grow their segment at the expense of coherence pull in different directions until the structural strength disappears.

The bamboo model requires both. Every segment grows. The colony stays coherent. The root system holds.

The reason bamboo's versatility matters isn't incidental. It is the point.

The same colony that builds scaffolding can clothe you. Can feed you. Can become the structure of a building or the handle of a kitchen knife. Its extraordinary range of application is only possible because of what happened underground. A bamboo cane grown without the rhizome system would be weak, hollow, narrow in its usefulness. The root work doesn't just enable the growth. It determines the quality of what grows.

Brands work the same way.

The brands I've watched fail didn't only fail to grow. They failed to stretch. They became brittle. They could do one thing competently but couldn't extend without fracturing. Ask them to cross a category and they cracked. Ask them to speak to a new audience and they sounded wrong. The equity was shallow, even if the awareness was high.

The brands with genuine root depth do something different. They earn versatility. The trust is deep enough to bear new weight. The colony is coherent enough that a new expression still feels like the same plant. They can scaffold, and clothe, and feed because the rhizome system can support all of it.

This is the ultimate test of a brand-building programme. Not whether you grew during the visible season. Whether what you built, during the invisible one, is versatile enough to serve the next decade of application. The root system determines not just the height. It determines the uses.

A decade of learnings from driving transformation has added one thing the original metaphor didn't fully capture.

The root system can be rebuilt.

I've seen brands that lost their roots through neglect, through short-termism, through leadership that treated them as machines to milk rather than as colonies, find them again. Slowly. Painfully. With the same invisible seasons that look like failure from the outside. But the biology is forgiving if you're willing to do the underground work.

That's what preparation for this week's news sent me back to. The questions worth asking at the beginning of any new challenge. Not "what's the campaign?" but "what's the root system?" Not "what's the growth target?" but "who is the colony?"

Later this week, I'll be sharing news about a new role. One that has put these questions in very sharp relief for me.

And it's all been a lovely reminder. At Simbioniq, the AI company I co-founded where we simulate people who can help brands and business make better decisions, much of last year was almost entirely underground work. No visible shoots. Plenty of moments of doubt. But we stayed with the root system: the infrastructure, the architecture, the right collaborations and growth has emerged with a clarity and momentum that only that kind of foundation can produce. The metaphor is not theoretical. I've just lived it again.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 4 May 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.