Your Brand Is an Island: What A Short Hike Teaches About Ecosystem Marketing

If you’ve ever played A Short Hike, you’ll know it’s not really a game about goals. There is a goal, technically. You play as Claire, a small bird visiting Hawk Peak Provincial Park, and the game gently nudges you towards the summit. But the magic of the game lives in everything that happens along the way. You wander, talk to people, fish, climb, glide, help strangers, find odd little corners, and slowly start to understand the island through its details.

It’s a game that gives you permission to go slowly. Nothing feels rushed or aggressively optimised. The island works because its parts feel connected: the trails, the beach, the café, the climbers, the boat rental, the characters you keep bumping into. It all belongs to the same world. That’s what makes it such a useful place to think about marketing. Not marketing as a set of tactics you drop onto a business from the outside, but marketing as a way of understanding where a business sits, what kind of world it belongs to, and why people would want to spend time there.

One business on the island is a small boat rental place tucked away in the Orange Islands. There is one boat, one employee, and a very serious fantasy novel. It’s not exactly a high-growth operation, but it is memorable because it fits so neatly into the world around it. So, naturally, I started wondering what would happen if the boat shop hired me to help with its marketing.

The obvious answer would be to increase awareness, attract more visitors, and get more people renting the boat, but those goals would not be enough on their own. The more important question is: what kind of strategy actually makes sense in this place? Because the boat shop does not exist in isolation. It is part of the island’s wider ecosystem.

The business is not the whole experience

The boat shop depends on more than the boat. It depends on the beach, the island, the visitors, the pace of the game, and the wider sense that this is a place worth exploring. If the surrounding experience fell flat, the boat rental would matter less. If the island didn’t invite curiosity, there would be less reason to see what the boat could unlock.

That is true for real businesses too.

A maker selling at a market is not only shaped by their own stall. They are shaped by the whole market: the signage, the atmosphere, the neighbouring traders, the food nearby, the conversations happening in the room, and the way people move through the space.

A small shop on a creative street is not only selling its own products. It is part of a visitor journey. People decide whether to linger, browse, spend, return, or recommend based on the overall experience around them. This is why ecosystem thinking matters. Your business may be brilliant, but if the wider context feels confusing, rushed, disconnected, or forgettable, your audience has less reason to stay.

For the boat shop, that might mean working with the café, the climbing club, or other island characters to create small shared moments: visitor stories, mini itineraries, local recommendations, or gentle reasons to move between places.

In real life, it might mean collaborating with nearby businesses, building relationships with event organisers, creating shared guides, or contributing to the culture of a market, trail, town, platform, or community. Not every collaboration needs to be a campaign. Sometimes it is simply about making the whole world around your business feel more coherent.

Brand positioning starts with what is already true

The boat rental employee is not especially polished. He is quiet. He is distracted. He would rather read his fantasy novel than deliver a perfect customer service script. But that is what makes him memorable! His love of the Bolder Boulders books gives him texture. It turns him from “person at boat shop” into someone who feels like he has an inner world. The detail is small, but it makes the business more specific.

This is where brand positioning often goes wrong for small creative businesses. People assume they need to become smoother, louder, or more impressive to be taken seriously. But the more useful work is often to identify what is already distinctive and make it easier for others to recognise. If you care about sustainability, show where that care affects your decisions. If your work is shaped by local history, material choices, humour, slowness, nostalgia, technical obsession, or a slightly awkward love of fantasy novels, don’t sand that away too quickly.

Personality is not a replacement for clarity. But clarity without personality can become forgettable.

The point is not to turn every quirk into a gimmick. It is to understand which details help people feel the world behind the offer. People do not only connect with products. They connect with the logic, values and atmosphere around them. They connect with the feeling that a business belongs to a particular world, and that they might want to spend time there too.

A good brand world leaves room for others

At one point in A Short Hike, the boat breaks. It is not fixed in isolation. Another character helps. That detail matters because it reinforces the island’s wider logic. Things work through connection and the island is full of tiny dependencies, just like real life.

For small businesses, this is often the difference between isolated marketing and community-aware marketing. An isolated brand tries to make itself the whole story. An ecosystem-aware brand understands that being part of something larger can make it stronger, not weaker. This is especially relevant for makers, artists, cafés, independent shops, studios, markets, workshops, and creative service providers. These businesses often grow through proximity, recommendation, shared values and repeated encounters. Their marketing does not need to pretend they exist alone. In fact, it is usually more powerful when they do not.

A ceramics studio might become part of a local weekend route. A workshop host might collaborate with a café that shares the same audience. A textile artist might build relationships with galleries, menders, natural dyers, or local historians. A market trader might become part of the reason people trust the market as a whole.

The individual brand becomes more memorable because the ecosystem around it has meaning.

The lesson from the island

The boat shop in A Short Hike does not need to become the loudest business on the beach. Marketing works best here in tandem with what already makes the island compelling: slowness, curiosity, connection, and a sense that every small element has a role in the wider experience.

A brand is not only a message - it is a place people enter. Even if that place is digital, temporary, or built through repeated interactions rather than physical walls.

So the question is not only: how do we get more people to notice this business?

It is also: where does this business sit? What ecosystem does it belong to? Who does it naturally connect with? What makes people want to stay longer? What makes them want to come back?

In A Short Hike, the island works because its parts feel connected. The boat shop, the café, the trails, the climbers, the readers, the repairs, the detours: each small piece makes the whole place more believable. Your business does not need to become louder to become more meaningful. It needs to become clearer about the world it is building, the relationships it depends on, and the kind of people who will want to anchor there.

I hope you enjoyed reading my thoughts on marketing through one of my most enjoyed games of the last 5 years! If gaming is your thing, I have a bunch of other blogs just like this for you to dive into. And if you’re building a brand that feels thoughtful, true to you, and part of something bigger,

And if you just want to connect, share thoughts, or say hello, I’m always up for a conversation over on LinkedIn. Come say hi. It’s always nice to meet someone else doing things their own way.