UKRAINE'S WARTIME NATION BRANDING: RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT THEORY IN CONTEXT

Abstract

Nation branding is a strategic and transformative process designed to enhance a nation’s international reputation through relationship management, a public-centric philosophy, decentralized collaboration, and interdisciplinary engagement with diverse strategic publics. Nation branding is inherently relational, yet this dimension remains underexplored in the literature—particularly in contexts of war, where these efforts take on heightened urgency and complexity. This dissertation examines Ukraine’s wartime nation branding through the lens of public relations’ relationship management theory, addressing the gap in understanding how organizations engage strategic publics. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with practitioners involved in branding initiatives across Ukrainian governmental and non-governmental organizations, as well as an analysis of 23 documents from four of these institutions, the study explores the unique challenges and characteristics of wartime nation branding since Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. It explores strategic publics in wartime nation branding and investigates how relationships between these publics and organizations are formed and sustained through a three-stage relationship management model (Broom et al., 1997) encompassing antecedents, strategies, and outcomes. The findings contribute to theory, practice, and policy by further exploring the relationship management approach in nation branding and proposing the concept of relational nation branding, defined as a strategic and transformative process designed to enhance a nation’s international reputation through relationship management, a public-centric philosophy, decentralized collaboration, and interdisciplinary engagement with diverse strategic publics. Besides, the study extends Broom et al.'s (1997) three-stage model by identifying strategic narrative building as an emerging relationship cultivation strategy and by conceptualizing satisfaction as encompassing both emotional and behavioral dimensions of relationship outcomes. It further examines the role of publics in wartime nation branding by introducing a multi-tiered segmentation framework that incorporates the concepts of dominant coalitions and intermediaries. Emphasizing the role of understudied publics, such as domestic and non-state actors, it proposes the term decentralized nation branding, building on both its findings and existing research in place branding, and advocates for the use of the more inclusive term national community in place of domestic publics. Finally, the study introduces the concept of transformative nation branding, framing it as a strategic, relationship-driven tool essential to national survival in wartime.