In chapter 3 of Activate Brand Purpose: Leveraging the Power of Movements to Transform Your Company, we discuss how and why movements are important to bring about change not just in society at large, but in the world of businesses and brands. Movements isolate the cultural, racial, environmental, and socio-economic stressors that people are experiencing and speaking up about, which can present both risk and opportunities for a company. But movements also illustrate why and how people are moved to action: More than mere corporate messages, people rally around movements because they stir us emotionally.

One problem with protests is that they often fail to transition into a bona fide movement. In Uprising, Scott Goodson’s first book on movements in 2011, Occupy Wall Street was in full swing. But it ultimately fizzled, proving that just having people in the streets does not necessarily equal success for a cause.

‘Occupy was, at its core, a movement constrained by its own contradictions: filled with leaders who declared themselves leaderless, governed by a consensus-based structure that failed to reach consensus, and seeking to transform politics while refusing to become political,’ wrote Michael Levitin (2015) in The Atlantic. Occupy’s undoing was that it was unfocused; people who were in support of the movement didn’t really know what to do to support it. A movement strategy would have kept the Occupy movement focused on driving positive change, and kept it front and centre and helped it grow instead of petering out.

Ironic as it may seem, the impact of the movement that many view as having decayed and disappeared may in fact have become stronger and clearer with time. The world’s 1 percent now possess almost as much combined wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And while no one in Washington may have the full answer about how to fix income inequality, more elected leaders, it seems, are now openly talking about the issue and framing solutions. Occupy got the diagnosis correct but real change doesn’t come in slogans; it comes when the people demand it.

In contrast, Black Lives Matter has managed to have a sustained movement, though we’re sure the organizers would prefer to have police brutality dealt with once and for all, rather than continually having to mobilize people. Speaking with USA Today in the weeks following the protests over Floyd’s death, Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors said the movement works because the organization is usually spontaneous and decentralized, relying almost solely on local, rather than national, leadership. ‘We don’t get (people) onto the streets, they get themselves onto the street,’ she told the paper (Miller, 2016).

Thus far we’ve been mainly discussing how movements work in society and culture. But protests have been aimed at companies and brands for decades, often in the form of boycotts. Since the purpose of this book is to articulate how the power of movements can be leveraged by company and brand leaders, it’s useful to spend a moment looking at how activism has shaped the world of commerce.

Read the full article about KEYWORD by Scott Goodson and Chip Walker at Stanford Social Innovation Review.