Ukrainian Brands Built Trust During Wartime, Proved Empathy Drives ROI

Ukraine's Wartime Brand Campaigns Deliver Measurable Trust Gains

When a crisis drags on for years rather than days, the usual playbook breaks down. Press releases about "business continuity" ring hollow. Customers notice when a brand is more focused on protecting its image than connecting with people's real experience.

What Ukraine's top-performing brands discovered is that empathy isn't soft. It's a hard business strategy. Brands that built genuine emotional connections during prolonged disruption consistently outperformed competitors on loyalty, trust, and long-term revenue.

Research backs this up. Empathy-grounded advertising is 79% more likely to drive brand choice, according to Motista. Ogilvy's 2025 loyalty research confirms the same pattern globally. And 87% of consumers say they would pay more for products from brands they trust, based on a 2025 Salsify study.

Four Brand Campaigns, Four Approaches, Consistent Results

Each company took a distinct approach. Together they demonstrate there's no single formula, just a consistent underlying logic.

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Mission MediaMission Media

McDonald's faced a labor shortage after millions of Ukrainians fled the country. To recruit teenagers aged 16 and 17, it partnered with five local influencers who filmed honest, lighthearted videos about learning on the job. Every shoot was paused during air raid alerts. The result: a 60% jump in job applications, with that age group now making up 10% of its Ukrainian workforce.

Mastercard created a 4,000 square meter mental health exhibition in Kyiv called Third Wind. Built with leading psychologists, it offered a rare space for emotional recovery during wartime. Over six weeks, 110,000 people visited. Ticket sales raised US$120,000 for trauma care, and AI monitoring in one zone recorded a 3.5x increase in measurable happiness.

DTEK, Ukraine's largest energy company, faced mass power outages caused by Russian attacks on infrastructure. Rather than issuing damage reports, it reframed the story around its own workers. A Christmas tree made of energy workers' helmets. A live performance of the traditional carol Shchedryk at a destroyed power plant. A light projection on a national monument. The campaign lifted brand trust to 70%, the highest of any energy company in Ukraine, despite ongoing blackouts.

Rozetka, Ukraine's biggest online retailer, had stayed silent for three years while focusing on keeping operations running. When it did return to the public conversation, it did so through cultural restoration. The company helped recreate a monumental mosaic destroyed in Mariupol, then took the replica on an international tour, including to London's Trafalgar Square. Without spending a single dollar on media, the campaign generated 120 million organic contacts and US$1.1 million in earned media.

Why APAC Marketing Leaders Are Watching These Results

Asia's senior marketers know their own version of sustained disruption. South China Sea tensions, trade friction between the US and China, political instability across Southeast Asia, and a region-wide mental health challenge following the pandemic. These aren't one-week crises.

Academic research published in Nature found that in collectivist societies, strong community-oriented behavior by brands provides more financial protection during a crisis than brand equity alone. That research focused on China, but the pattern holds across most of Asia.

Miroslava Gribova, Managing Director at Be-it Agency, the firm behind McDonald's Ukraine campaign, put it plainly: "Ukrainian audiences expect brands to demonstrate empathy and awareness of the broader context." That expectation is not unique to Ukraine. It is increasingly the norm everywhere.

The PRovoke APAC Summit 2025 was organized around a single theme: Protecting Brands and Reputations in a Perma-Crisis World. That choice of theme reflects where the industry has landed. Crisis is no longer an exception. It is the operating environment.

The brands that will hold customer loyalty through the next disruption are not the ones with the fastest legal clearance process. They are the ones that stayed close to their communities when things were hard.