APAC Brand Trust Hits COVID Lows—Here's How Ukrainian Firms Broke the Cycle

Why Business-As-Usual Is No Longer Good Enough

Brand trust across Asia Pacific has just hit its lowest point since COVID-19. Consumer confidence is down 10.9 points in Thailand, 6.1 in Malaysia, and 5.1 in South Korea. Meanwhile, the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of people believe business leaders deliberately mislead them.

That creates a very specific problem for marketers. How do you keep running campaigns, hiring staff, and building brand equity when the audience is already exhausted and skeptical?

Four Ukrainian companies answered that question during active wartime. Their answers are directly relevant to every communications executive navigating uncertainty in Asia today.

Running a Hiring Campaign When Your Audience Is Traumatized

McDonald's Ukraine needed to recruit thousands of new staff in 2025, including minors aged 16 and 17 for the first time. The country had been at war for over three years. Millions of people had fled or been displaced. Emotional fatigue was everywhere.

The company partnered with five influencers to create lighthearted "oops moment" content that showed what it was actually like to start working at McDonald's. The videos were fun, honest, and deliberately low-key. All filming was coordinated in real time around air raid alerts.

The result: a 60% increase in job applications, with 16-17 year olds making up 10% of all restaurant employees by year-end, at lower turnover than older cohorts.

"Can any element unintentionally trigger part of the audience?" That question, from Miroslava Gribova, Managing Director at Be-it Agency, is now the defining test for any campaign running in a stressed market.

Turning a Crisis Into a Trust-Building Platform

DTEK is Ukraine's largest energy company. By late 2025, Russian attacks on infrastructure had caused power outages at unprecedented scale. Public frustration was intense. The wrong communications response could have accelerated brand collapse.

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Instead, the company launched "The Light Holds On", a campaign that deliberately shifted focus away from the company itself and toward the frontline energy workers restoring power daily under threat of attacks. Cultural activations included a Christmas tree made of workers' helmets and a live performance of "Carol of the Bells" at a destroyed thermal plant.

DTEK achieved 96% brand awareness and a 70% trust rating, the highest among Ukrainian energy companies, despite the outages. 75% of Ukrainians reported positive brand perception.

The lesson for APAC: during a prolonged crisis without a clear end date, humanizing your organization's people beats defending your organization's performance.

Purpose-Led Campaigns Don't Need Media Spend

Rozetka, Ukraine's largest online marketplace, had gone largely silent for three years while focusing on operational survival. It was losing emotional relevance even as it maintained service quality.

The company commissioned an exact replica of a war-damaged Mariupol mosaic, sourced using rare 1960s materials, and put it on a mobile tour as a symbol of national cultural resilience. Total paid media budget: zero.

The project generated 120 million organic contacts and US$1.1 million in earned media value, and shifted Rozetka's brand perception from "convenient marketplace" to "emotionally connected national leader."

Co-founder Iryna Chechotkina put it plainly: "What our consumers value most is feeling supported, knowing that we aren't indifferent and that we truly understand what Ukrainians need."

The APAC Stakes Are Real

The consequences of getting this wrong in Asia are not theoretical. When Dolce and Gabbana launched a chopsticks campaign in China in 2018, the backlash was immediate. The hashtag reached 20 million views within hours. Celebrity endorsers withdrew. Alibaba removed the brand. China sales collapsed 90% almost instantly.

That was a marketing misstep in stable conditions. The risk is amplified when consumer trust is already fragile and audiences are primed for disappointment.

The 2026 IABC communications analysis is direct: "Preparing empathetic crisis response is not just best practice. It is the standard organizations will be judged by."

Asian brands don't need to wait for a crisis to start building that standard. The Ukrainian playbook is already written.