Research Insight | Marketing’s Role During War: Building Resilience in Ukraine
Since the start of Russia’s war on Ukraine, marketing efforts expressing defiance, solidarity, and resistance have become commonplace in Ukraine. For example, brands in Ukraine have marketed chocolate figurines satirically depicting Russia’s head of state as a prisoner under the brand line “Beware, Putin!” and jigsaw puzzles depicting Ukraine’s destroyed historical buildings.
This research focuses on marketing’s role in building community resilience in wartime—crucial for people in Ukraine and in over 30 countries where war is ongoing. The authors show how and why people living in wartime adversity create, perceive, and respond to war-related marketing activism actions.
These marketing activism actions—if they are perceived as authentic actions of citizenship rather than pursuit of sales—can strengthen resilience for civilian populations affected by war, the authors find. In community dialogues, these marketing actions represent pathways of resilience—showing how the community can progress from survival to creativity and growth, and ultimately to recovery.
The authors recommend that governments, organizations, and marketing professional bodies establish policies encouraging a responsible approach to war-related marketing activism actions to safeguard against misuse.
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What You Need to Know
- War-related marketing activism can support community resilience of civilians living in war conditions.
- Consumers may engage with, question, or reject marketing activism actions during war.
- Mindful and systematic policies for war-related marketing activism can facilitate leveraging it as a community resilience resource and safeguard against its misuse and misappropriation.
Abstract
Extant literature considers marketing activities as instrumental for postwar recovery and peace-building. However, war is an ongoing lived experience for numerous societies across the world. Focusing on the role of marketing during war, this article presents a study examining how and why people living in war adversity deploy, perceive, and respond to war-related marketing activism actions (MAA). War-related MAA are acts through which brands/organizations and consumers create or draw on marketing meanings to convey and to enact stances and experiences related to war. This study adopts a multimodal qualitative methodology integrating photo elicitation and in-depth interviews with consumers and with marketing and management professionals in Ukraine, the country enduring invasion and war by Russia at the time of this article’s publication. Analyses through a community resilience theoretical lens generate a conceptualization that demonstrates how war-related MAA are harnessed and serve as a medium in community dialogues concerning envisaged resilience trajectories (survival, creativity and growth, and recovery). The article advances understanding of marketing activism during war by illuminating its potential and boundary conditions for serving as a community resilience resource. It also offers public policy development directions for marketing practice, organizations, and governments.
Eva Kipnis, Nataliia Pysarenko, Cristina Galalae, Carlo Mari, Verónica Martín Ruiz, and Lizette Vorster (2024), “The Role of War-Related Marketing Activism Actions in Community Resilience: From the Ground in Ukraine,” Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. doi:10.1177/07439156241262983