Transformation of Advertising Communications in the Context of the Full-Scale War: The Case of Ukrainian Barbershops
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17721/10.17721/2522-1272.2026.89.9Keywords:
advertising communication, barbershops, digital environment, full-scale war, language transformation, social-value communication, brand, communicative adaptationAbstract
The aim of the study was to identify and systematize the main transformations of advertising communications of Ukrainian barbershops in the context of the full-scale war by comparing the pre-war and wartime periods and examining different trajectories of brand development. The empirical basis is a corpus of approximately 500 advertising posts from three Ukrainian barbershops, B1, B2, and B3, divided into two periods: from 2019 to February 23, 2022, and from February 24, 2022, to 2026. STATUS was analyzed separately as a contrasting case of a brand established after the beginning of the full-scale war. Methods included content analysis, comparative analysis, discourse analysis, visual and multimodal analysis, and systematization. The results show that the transformations identified in the cases were multidimensional and nonlinear: changes concerned language code, social-value components, tone, visual representation, and selected positioning practices. At the same time, the basic commercial core of the brands was preserved. B1 demonstrated selective adaptation; B2 showed intensive but partly situational expansion; B3 combined linguistic-cultural and social adaptation with the preservation of its professional and image-oriented positioning; while STATUS demonstrated the initial formation of communication in an already transformed environment. The results concern the examined corpus and do not claim to represent the entire Ukrainian barbershop market.
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Data Availability Statement
The research dataset and analytical materials have been registered on ZENODO: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23977903. The file contains a description of the empirical corpus, analytical categories, the comparative analysis procedure, and summarized research findings. Original social media posts are not included in the dataset due to copyright restrictions and the access policies of the respective platforms. The dataset does not contain individual-level data or personal data.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Андрій Петренко (Автор)
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