When Law Becomes Market Risk: Lawfare, Threat Communication, and Defensive Marketing Adaptation in Stressed Political Economies

This article asks how lawfare—the strategic use of legal and judicial instruments against political opponents—reshapes firm marketing strategy in economies marked by high inflation, weak consumer confidence, and political insecurity. Centering Türkiye and comparing the framework with Hungary, it argues that lawfare matters to markets not only through formal institutional effects but also through threat communication. Indictments, prosecutions, trustee appointments, and judicial-executive narratives recast political conflict as risk, and these signals travel through captured media environments and politicized advertising markets to alter consumer sentiment and firms’ reputational calculations. The article does not claim that lawfare causes firms to market uniformly. It claims that lawfare raises perceived political, reputational, and demand risk, and that firms manage this elevated risk through a bundle of adjustments termed defensive adaptation: greater emphasis on price and promotion, reduced issue salience in brand communication, selective localization, safer channel mixes, and more cautious partnerships with public-facing actors. Integrating comparative politics, business-cycle marketing, consumer-polarization scholarship, and consumer neuroscience, the article specifies a mechanism in which threat framing and inflationary price salience jointly shift the attentional and valuation processes underpinning purchase decisions, narrowing the feasible frontier of marketing strategy. Methodologically, it is designed as a multiphase sequential mixed-methods design study combining event-based analysis of public legal texts, mainstream and social-media discourse, brand campaigns, advertising-library data, and, where accessible, merchant-level transaction proxies and agency reports. The manuscript is presented throughout as a research design and analytical protocol: constructs, data sources, group assignments, and estimation strategy are specified in advance, and no empirical findings are reported or implied. The contribution is threefold: it extends lawfare research into market behavior, extends marketing-under-stress research into politically coercive environments, and moves consumer-polarization research beyond consolidated democracies into settings where the operative constraint is state action as well as consumer backlash.