In the face of the war that broke out in Ukraine, it is impossible to remain indifferent: we cannot be indifferent as people and not even as professionals. We know that at this very moment there is not just one war but several wars throughout the world, perhaps even bloodier than the Ukrainian one, but for various reasons this one is worrying us more: it is an episode of “selective emotion” that is well analyzed by Ingrid Colanicchia on Micromega.
Beyond the many reasons that
Make us so sensitive to this conflict, however, those who work in the marketing field have had to ask themselves, in recent days, if and how to address this issue in a brand’s communications. If not making references to what is happening in the world might seem like an act of superficiality, it is also true that appropriating issues that are perhaps light years away from the values of a company could be perceived as a captatio benevolentiae: a desire to grab a few likes, with yet another post on the topic of the day.
Pantone has shown support for
Ukraine by naming the colors of the flag as Freedom Blue” and “Energizing Yellow”. As Tiffany Hsu promptly analyzes in the New York Times, as soon as the conflict exploded, many brands rushed to express solidarity with the Ukrainian people: productivity apps, e-Sports teams, cryptocurrency services and advertising giants.
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The boycott by PornHub
However, was a hoax. A message of closeness, however simple, can already be political: a nuance is enough, such as the choice of the word invasion instead of the word war, to give a different interpretation of the facts. In any case, it is perhaps the first step and the least risky of all.
In some cases, a message of
Closeness and a Ukrainian flag on the logo were indonesia phone number data resource enough, in others the formal gesture pushed customers to ask what that brand is actually doing to support Ukraine. An example above all is that of Nestlé: if on the one hand the brand has published content in support of the country governed by Zelensky, it is currently also the target of a real boycott due to the refusal to abandon the Russian market.
But how should a brand
Behave in a context of war? Let’s be clear, this is not a new issue. For at least two centuries, companies that pay attention to communication have had to deal with the issue of war. During the world wars, brands like Coca Cola and Johnson & Johnson could get into debt just to show their support for the troops: on the all-too complicit relationship between marketing and war, there are books like “The Huns Have Got My Gramophone!”, which shows us in a disturbing way the proliferation of advertising campaigns that exploited the Great War to sell cigarettes, gramophones or even guard dogs.
A famous wartime campaign
Taken from the book “The Huns Have Got My anhui mobile phone number list Gramophone”. Today, however, many things have changed. Even if the world has never stopped seeing wars, in Europe we perceived them as so distant that we have forgotten how to deal with them. Probably, most creatives working in agencies today can only cling to 9/11 or COVID, to understand the emotional context that arose from this conflict, but they are not really overlapping dramas.
Of course, today most brands
Have positions against the war, but it is also true that historically marketing has always suggested distancing itself as much as possible from politics, making advertising communication extraneous to such dramatic issues. However, we are in the era of social media and also that of Generation Z, which have in fact accustomed every brand to taking an explicit position on certain values: under penalty of boycott.
Today some digital strategists
Such as Aaron Kwittken of KWT Global, have literally ordered all brands and agencies not only to interrupt certain campaigns (something to do in an emergency, but which cannot be perpetuated for long) but also to take explicit positions of support for Ukraine, shouting “Silence is violence”.
