The Meme’s-Eye View of Strategic Communication: A Case Study of Social Movements from a Memetic Perspective

Abstract

The article argues that a memetic approach, or meme’s-eye view, could help bring together the strategic management view and the CCO-school. ‘Memes’ are understood as a second-order concept, i.e., as a reference to ‘memory traces’ in people’s minds and anchor-point of joint or collective intentionality. This view, it is argued, permits the conceptualization of communication as a resource. To illustrate, two cases are analyzed: 1) the Montagsdemos in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) with its core meme Wir sind das Volk (We are the people); 2) the so-called ‘Satanic Panic’ and the QAnon movement with its ‘Save the Children'-meme’. The analysis illustrates how memes endure and resurface in new and different environments. In conclusion, the article proposes that the shift to memetic population dynamics allows strategic communication-researchers to reformulate often unanswerable questions (“What does the strategic actor want?”) into more operationalizable ones (“What memes are launched? How are they constructed?”).