Are Movements Becoming the New Media?

When content is abundant, participation may be the harder—and more valuable—thing for brands to create.

What if the next important evolution in media isn’t another channel?

It may be something people choose to join.

That’s the provocative possibility that emerged from a recent Internationalist conversation with Scott Goodson, Founder and Chairman of StrawberryFrog and creator of Movement Thinking.

Scott Goodson has spent more than three decades studying something marketers have always wanted but rarely controlled: how an idea becomes bigger than the organization that originated it.

His premise is deceptively simple. Movements give people a framework within which they can join, participate, and act. And while conventional advertising has traditionally attempted to influence what people think, Goodson describes movements as being fundamentally about getting people to do something.

That distinction feels particularly relevant now.

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When Content Is No Longer Scarce

AI is rapidly lowering the barriers to creating content. More organizations can produce more messages, more variations, more quickly and at lower cost than ever before.

But abundance doesn’t necessarily create attention.

It may make attention—and certainly genuine participation—more valuable.

That’s where Scott Goodson’s thinking begins to suggest a different way of looking at media.

Traditionally, media gives a brand access to an audience. A movement has the potential to do something different: create a community around a shared idea and give people a role within it.

That’s our interpretation rather than Goodson’s explicit definition of media. But his experience provides an intriguing case for considering it.

His early work with smart, the microcar developed by Swatch and Mercedes-Benz, brought together groups that would not ordinarily participate in a car launch—including city governments, rental-car companies, and organizations interested in changing urban environments. The brand became the focal point for a coalition around a larger idea.

The marketing wasn’t simply telling people about a new car.

It was giving different constituencies a reason to participate in a conversation about the future of cities.

From Saying to Doing

This distinction also helps refresh a word many marketers have heard perhaps too often: purpose.

Goodson isn’t arguing that purpose has become irrelevant. He’s arguing that it becomes ineffective when it remains a declaration.

He describes purpose as the idea that gives an organization meaning beyond product, price, or money. The problem comes when that idea remains at the top of the company rather than becoming something employees understand and act upon.

Movement changes the equation because participation changes the equation.

At Walmart, for example, StrawberryFrog took the company’s familiar “Save Money. Live Better.” promise and used “Live Better” as an internal movement to help associates better understand the benefits available to them. At Emirates, “Hello Tomorrow” began as a way of creating common ground among a highly multinational workforce before becoming an external advertising platform.

These aren’t simply communication examples.

They’re examples of marketing ideas becoming organizing ideas.

And perhaps that’s the more interesting evolution.

Participation Can’t Be Claimed

There is an important caution here.

Calling something a movement doesn’t make it one.

Goodson himself makes an important distinction: while every organization may benefit from a larger mission, not every organization necessarily deserves to lead one.

Credibility matters. Relevance matters. And the connection between the societal idea and the brand has to make sense.

Which brings us to three questions that may be more useful than asking, Should my brand start a movement?

Is there something larger than product or price that your brand credibly stands for?

Can people participate in it—or are you merely telling them about it?

Does it begin inside the organization before you ask consumers to believe it?

These aren’t questions about creating another campaign.

They’re questions about whether marketing can help create the conditions for people to care, participate, and perhaps even belong.

So, Are Movements the New Media?

Not literally.

And perhaps that’s what makes the idea worth considering.

Media will continue to matter. Channels will continue to evolve. AI will undoubtedly make the creation, personalization, and distribution of content even more sophisticated.

But when everyone can create more content, simply creating more may become less of an advantage.

Scott Goodson’s argument points toward something harder to manufacture: shared belief translated into action.

He predicts that brands capable of building communities of advocates around ideas relevant to what people are actually feeling will continue to play an important role, even in an increasingly algorithm-driven world.

Perhaps, then, the next evolution of media isn’t another place for brands to appear.

Maybe it’s creating something people choose to join.