Brands Response to Ukraine Invasion: Passive vs Proactive Purposefulness
Like hurricane Katrina turned a brand like Walmart into a purposeful organisation, over the past decade, and in particular during the past two years, crisis has been one of the main drivers of brand purposefulness. Going beyond profit, making a change in the society and the world, and improving lives have become top priorities for many CEOs and marketing managers. No longer an option. purposefulness has become an act of conforming and box ticking. Brands conform to the expectations of society and hope to neutralise and match competitors’ new source of brand energy and relevance. But for some brands, injecting human values into business practices at times of crisis does become the beginning of a shift from traditional business and marketing towards a continuous commitment to becoming a good corporate citizen and making an impact on the society.
Building on Covid-19 crisis management
Covid-19 forced organisations to revisit their practices in relation to people, planet, and products. Some have acknowledged employee rights and began offering flexible workplaces (for example, Starbucks and Unilever extending benefits, deferring debts and offering cashflow relief to cushion the economic impact of Covid on employees). Some have enhanced community wellbeing (as ‘Chipotle Together’ Zoom catch ups, enabling fans to hang out and mingle with celebrities). Some have pulled sensitive advertising and communication content, such as ad campaigns that were not in line with the social distancing and stay-at-home messages governments were broadcasting. Given the global impacts of such a health and economic crisis, practising purposefulness became mainstream and spread quickly among brands across different industries.
Response agility
Over the past two years, brands have become much more agile in their response to major health, nature, and sociopolitical issues the society is facing. From Covid to the social injustice protests and unrest, brands have gone from focusing on their offerings to becoming warriors for sociopolitical causes, communicating fewer offerings and more inspiring quotations. Brands have gained significant experience in responding to society’s callout and participating in solving the challenges humanity is facing.
Ukraine invasion
Even with that experience gained, the degree of dissimilarity in the issues society has faced just over the past two years has made it difficult for brands to craft responses. The war in Ukraine has presented a new challenge. Since 24 February, when Russia invaded Ukraine, many brands have responded. But unlike during the pandemic, when brands have tried to be creative and come up with different solutions, the responses to the war in Ukraine can be placed into two broad categories: pause and donate.
Passive vs proactive
Brands responding to the Ukraine invasion have offered support to Ukrainians or paused operations in Russia. What percentage of brands have focused on helping Ukrainians, easing their sufferings, and what percentage have focused on pausing and halting operations in Russia? While there are no concrete statistics yet, a glance at the list of responses suggests that the majority of brands have decided to go down the path of ‘pause and halt’. This is perhaps one of those symbolic but costly moves that has limited impact on those affected and at risk in Ukraine. For instance, it is not clear how the Disney+ decision to delay the launch of the movie Turning Red in Russia can help Ukrainians. Such responses can be labelled passive. They have unclear impacts on the affected community in Ukraine. Instead, a more proactive approach by Disney+ would be to create content that could help educate and inform Russian young generations about the truth behind the war. Even more proactive, Disney could donate the revenue from such content generated in Russia to Ukrainians, turning a suboptimal symbolic move into a productive and effective move with substance and positive outcomes, hitting the target of helping Ukrainians at risk.
The $1 million donation move
Many brands not ‘pausing’ to support Ukrainians have been creative enough only to donate a certain sum, around the magic number of $1 million, as a self-defined threshold to tick the box of good corporate citizenship. Of course, there are examples of creative brands like Airbnb offering accommodations to 100000 refugees, which shows a great degree of alignment between a core business focus and a purposeful act; however, overall, it seems the broad theme of support response is about the $1 million donation.
With more than 3 million refugees so far, brands’ response to the war in Ukraine has great potential to be more productive, efficient, and effective.
