What if your customers wanted to create content about your brand without you ever asking them to?
That question sits behind an idea BizBOXTV founder Lisa Ostrikoff describes as Socialgenic – products, places and experiences that naturally trigger people to stop, photograph, film, talk about and share what they encounter.
Long before user-generated content became an industry acronym, the underlying behaviour was already visible:
People create media around things they find remarkable.
JUSTGO became one of BizBOXTVs clearest real-world demonstrations of what happens when that behaviour is designed into the experience itself.
JUSTGO Becomes a Real-World Media Laboratory
When JUSTGO began putting vintage Volkswagen campervans onto Vancouver Island roads, the vehicles did more than transport travellers.
They interrupted attention.
A colourful Westfalia at a beach, campground or ferry terminal was difficult to ignore. People looked. They asked questions. They took photographs.
Travellers documented their own trips.
Photos came back. Videos appeared. Stories accumulated.
The product was generating media.
“I have always been interested in what makes someone instinctively stop, look, capture something and share it. The strongest marketing often starts before you ever ask someone to market anything.”
– Lisa Ostrikoff, Founder, BizBOXTV
That observation eventually produced a useful word for the phenomenon:
Socialgenic.
Something is socialgenic when its brand design, experience or identity naturally generates social behaviour.
People want to photograph it.
Film it.
Talk about it.
Send it.
Post it.
Remember it.
And that distinction matters enormously for modern brands.
UGC Is the Output. The Experience Is the Engine.
Most marketing conversations begin too late.
Brands ask:
How do we get more UGC?
A better question may be:
Why would anyone want to create it?
A business can incentivize customers to produce content. It can launch a hashtag. Run a contest. Hire creators. Ask for reviews.
But the strongest brands create an experience people already want to document.
That changes the equation:
EXPERIENCE → MEDIA → DISCOVERY → EXPERIENCE
Someone experiences the brand.
They capture it.
Someone else discovers that media.
Attention becomes curiosity.
Curiosity becomes intent.
Intent creates another customer experience.
And that experience generates more media.
The audience becomes part of the distribution system.
Socialgenic Design Is Not Just for Travel Brands
Socialgenic thinking can apply to:
Automotive: What happens at vehicle delivery that somebody actually wants to photograph?
Hospitality: What visual or experiential moment becomes the inevitable Instagram Story?
Home services: What transformation creates the before-and-after people want to show someone?
Retail: What packaging, reveal or environment becomes part of the purchase experience?
Events: What moment causes 200 phones to come out simultaneously?
Professional brands: What knowledge, access or perspective is valuable enough that someone sends it to somebody else?
The execution changes.
The behavioural principle does not.
Stop Asking What You Should Post
There is enormous pressure on businesses to produce more.
More videos. More Reels. More Shorts. More posts. More AI content.
But volume does not solve an experience problem.
Distribution can amplify attention.
Advertising can buy reach.
AI can accelerate production.
None of them can make something inherently interesting.
So before asking:
What should we post?
Ask:
What are we creating that people will want to talk about?
“You can engineer distribution. But first, give people something worth distributing.”
JUSTGO provided BizBOXTV with a particularly visible demonstration of that principle. Years of traveller photographs, Instagram stories, YouTube videos and moments shared with the JUSTGO Facebook community created a growing digital record of experiences people genuinely wanted to capture and share.
And that may be one of the most important distinctions in modern media:
Do not just create content around the brand.
Create a brand capable of creating media around itself.
