We all feel it. The feed is full of posts, the Gantt chart is packed with tasks, but the mind? The mind is busy calculating how much we can get done before the next siren, while the heart braces itself for the jarring sound of the early warning alert.
March 2026. The Israeli reality is upending itself again. After just a few months of hope, we find ourselves once more in shelters and at war. In a reality like this, one that has become routine in recent years, the same question keeps surfacing:
How do you manage a brand when your audience is simply exhausted? How do you market without sounding disconnected from the pain and the tension? What is right, and what is doable, in times like these?
At Imaginet, we always say that “experience is the whole story.” In wartime, that experience needs to be wrapped in extreme sensitivity and surgical precision.
Here are some deeper thoughts on how to do marketing that sees people, not just numbers, in the midst of this current campaign.
A Growth Strategy Within the Storm
In times of war, it’s very easy to slip into a state of marketing paralysis — a “let’s wait until the war is over” mindset. But experience shows that brands that stop completely struggle enormously to restart.
One day, and hopefully very soon, this campaign will end. When that day comes, you want to be ready with what you have to offer. During the forced lulls and the quieter hours, that is precisely the time to turn inward:
- Refresh your brand language
- Improve your digital assets
- Build a strategy that will launch you forward the moment the quiet returns
A strong brand knows how to redirect its energy and effort into internal development.
Use this time to edit the videos you’ve filmed, sharpen your messaging in the spirit of the moment, and build toward your next leap forward. Those who plant thought and planning now will harvest the fruits when we all return to a blessed routine.
Marketing in 2026 is agile marketing: fast, responsive, sensitive, and above all, always moving.
Empathetic B2B Marketing – Person to Person, Not Business to Business
When talking about B2B (Business to Business), it’s easy to fall into the trap of language that is businesslike, technical, and often too professional, too dry. Sometimes we forget that behind every business and company, every CEO and marketing director, there are, first and foremost, people.
In wartime, B2B becomes Human to Human.
The procurement manager, VP of Marketing, and startup CEO you work with are all inside the same storm right now. On the one side, they’re dealing with challenges at home: reserve duty, children, and fears. On the other side, they’re navigating company challenges: staff shortages, delayed shipments, and absent suppliers.
Alongside personal worries, they are still under pressure to deliver results regardless of the situation. (The parent company in London, for example, is less sympathetic.) Empathetic B2B marketing means stopping the sale of functional solutions and beginning to offer partnership solutions.
Don’t send generic emails that imply “business as usual” with cold professionalism. Be the partners who truly make it possible for them to keep going. Instead of pushing to close deals, try to understand how your solutions and products can help during this period and ease the burden. Shake hands.
Understand where the opportunity lies to create a warm, human, committed connection, one that will work better for both sides, even on the day after. Marketing that feels less transactional and more friendly builds trust that lasts for years.
When a supplier becomes an anchor of stability in the midst of the chaos, when they get you the heating element for the machine that stopped working within a day, even though their factory is in Karmiel and yours is in Sderot, they stop being just a “supplier.” They become a meaningful, strategic part of the client company.
This is the time to put away the ties and transform written and spoken communication into something professional yet focused on offering the solution that enables continuity of operation, not the successful deal. In the end, both will happen, but the language and the approach will change.
Build partnerships of open hearts, listening, and mutual goodwill, so that one day, when the fighting subsides, everyone will continue working together.
Employer Branding – Resilience That Starts from Within
War is a time of crisis, and in such times, more than ever, you need to identify where the opportunity lies. We invite you to look inward at your company and at your employees.
In an emergency, the story is first and foremost about mutual responsibility and togetherness: understanding and embracing your most important resource: your people. This is the time to turn internal communication into your most powerful external marketing tool.
When employees feel that the company sees them (not just their output), their loyalty and resilience grow, and that reflects directly on clients. This is true always, and in wartime, more than ever.
How do you do it in practice?
- See the reservists who are jumping again from jeans to uniform.
- See the parents trying to be “good enough” for their children while working under fire.
- Turn the company WhatsApp group into a safe space for conversation and humanity.
Right now, everyone is first a person, and only then a manager or an employee.
Alongside internal work, your external marketing on the company’s digital assets must also reflect these internal values. If you are a company that takes care of its employees during wartime, tell that story. Not from a place of “look how wonderful we are,” but from a place of shared experience.
What people see during the days of war will illuminate your brand during times of routine and will make your company attractive to talented people looking for their next great workplace.
Everything written here was born against a backdrop of explosions. But if we examine each idea carefully, we realize it holds true and is worthy even in ordinary times. How we hope, we truly hope, those ordinary times return to us soon.