Moral boundaries of everyday life in wartime: a sociological analysis of brand communications (based on expert interviews)
The article examines the role of brand communications in constructing the moral boundaries of everyday life during the Russo-Ukrainian war. It aims to conceptualise the marketing of normality as a sociocultural practice and to reconstruct the professional criteria by which specialists distinguish between the legitimate maintenance of everyday life and the commercial normalisation of war. Brand communications are conceptualised as a sphere of moral regulation of everyday life. The central distinction is drawn between the normalisation of life, which preserves recognition of the ongoing threat and loss, and the normalisation of war, which transforms it into an aesthetic background, an emotional stimulus, or a commercial resource. The empirical basis of the article consists of 16 semi-structured interviews with marketing professionals, brand strategists, advertising and public relations specialists, digital communications practitioners, and media researchers. A deductive-inductive thematic analysis was used to process the interview data. The findings show that, in professional interpretations, the marketing of normality operates through three interrelated processes: the representation of adapted everyday practices, the legitimation of an expanded range of emotional states, and the reframing of consumption into the sphere of economic and civic participation. The findings further indicate that experts regard such communications as a means of publicly justifying the right to work, rest, consume, and plan for the future under conditions of prolonged threat. At the same time, the forms of normality constructed by brands may universalise the experiences of groups with greater resources for adaptation, commercialise traumatic experiences, and equate consumption symbolically with forms of participation involving direct risk and responsibility. Four tests of legitimacy for brand communications are identified: temporal appropriateness, consistency between public statements and a company’s actual actions, the ethical representation of groups directly affected by the war, and the transparency and proportionality of public benefit relative to commercial gain.
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