The war in Ukraine found numerous global brands publicly taking stances on the issue. They turned to their social media channels to disclose their initiatives, which ranged from simple statements through to actions of greater substantiality such as donations and divestments and triggered a lively conversation and opposing consumer reactions. The phenomenon of brands advocating for crucial but polarising socio-political matters is known as brand activism and is a concept still under-conceptualised. Our study extends the knowledge of brand activism in two ways. First, we address literature calls for investigating the ways through which the marketplace endorses peace by exploring how brand activism serves as a peace marketing tool. We, therefore, term brands’ stance-taking promoting peace or in relation to war as “peace brand activism” and embark on fully unpacking it as a concept. Second, extending the understanding of the concept of brand activism that stands as mostly unidimensional, we proceed in developing a comprehensive conceptualisation of peace brand activism that tracks the range of forms it can take and accounts for its different types and characteristics. Our work employs an exploratory qualitative analysis to unravel how global brands become peace activists, as disclosed in their social media channels across different platforms. Our data captures the activities of a sample of global brands across social media channels. Our findings reveal the range of brand activism forms that can be employed by brands. We also unearth the types of peace brand activism approaches that can be adopted when disclosing peace brand activism initiatives on social media channels. Our work contributes to theory by providing a holistic understanding of the concept of brand activism for peace and explicates important implications for managers and policy makers alike.

Export diversification – the extent to which the firm seizes export sales opportunities across different nations and/or geographic regions – is a critical element of export marketing strategy. Yet, knowledge of the export performance consequences of export diversification is lacking. Underpinned by contingency and resource dependence theories, we examine the export diversification-export performance relationship as well as critical contingencies of this link. Based on a sample of UK exporters we find that firms gain the highest export performance benefits when they simultaneously increase national and regional export diversification. Our results also show that the export diversification-export performance link is weaker when firms operate in markets that are very in dynamism. Additionally, the relationship between export diversification and performance is stronger when both resource sharing and interfunctional coordination are high. Such contextual factors provide a better understanding of the diversification-performance relationship.