The Polish brand Unitra, once a flagship of domestic hi-fi electronics during the socialist era, has recently returned to the market in a symbolically charged form. Revived by Michał Kiciński, co-founder of CD Projekt, Unitra is no longer merely a relic of the past but a premium brand deeply embedded in discourses of national pride, technological nostalgia, and cultural revalorization. This paper explores the cultural dynamics behind the reactivation of Unitra, analysing how owners and consumers engage with and contribute to the brand’s new meaning. Using a case study enriched by critical discourse analysis (CDA), this paper examines how narrative representations reconstruct the symbolic legacy of Unitra. The analysis contributes to the literature on cultural branding, nostalgic consumption, and post-socialist brand heritage by situating the revival of Unitra within broader cultural shifts in Polish society.

The article attempts to capture the axial, pressing conflicts in the field of marketing theory and practice today, taking as a reference point one of the most discussed advertising campaign of recent years in Poland of the YES brand, local jewellery manufacturer. The paper offers a socio-cultural explanation for the success of the campaign as an example of challenging modernist intuitions in marketing communication. Specifically, it explores the conditions and course of the social transformation that fuelled the emergence of an identity market for the brand and demonstrates how marketing communications aligned with identity projects of Polish consumers. In the realm of organization theory, it is argued that common theoretical and cognitive assumptions about the nature of the sociocultural context of organizing and basic management principles, such as the assumed separation between an organization and its environment, prove to be a dysfunctional barrier to the transition to a new two-way model of communication with consumers.