🎧 13 Marketing Leaders on: What Works Now?
Diving deep on the shifts that actually matter for brands right now, straight from the industry leaders running them. Plus: Your summer podcast playlist to get inspired.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
Summer is here and it’s getting hot!
If you are like me, you might want to spend this season when things hopefully turn down a notch to gain some energy and maybe also some inspiration.
For the last couple of years I published reading recommendations on books (1, 2, 3, 4) to help you with your marketing strategy during the holidays.
But this year I have to admit I didn’t get a lot of reading done yet 🙈.
So today I have something else for you:
I had 13 podcast conversations with industry and marketing leaders about the shifts that currently matter for brands.
I talked to people from companies like Manner, Ö3, Henkel, Fairphone, the Austrian National Tourist Office, Danube Insurance, The Good Plastic Company, ÖBB/The Austrian National Railways and LinkedIn as well as the International Advertising Association (IAA).
All conversations were based on my marketing trend report FRICTION RELOADED, which I launched mid January and since then it has been read 6.500 times. I’ve presented it at 20 keynotes and corporate client sessions.
I asked each of these experts what their perspectives are on what works in marketing, what’s trending and what we need to focus on for consumer behaviour.
Here is what stuck with me, including links to all the podcast episodes:
🌐 The state of the (marketing) world
Three forces sit underneath all of it:
a tighter economy
AI in every workflow
and an audience splitting in two.
Fredrik Borestrom, World President of the IAA and LinkedIn’s director of international agency development, put the AI shift bluntly (Apple Podcast / Spotify):
“Brands and agencies are having to pivot completely from what they do, what they say, what content they produce, in this new world of LLMs. We're now having full Q&A sessions with the likes of Claude, Copilot and ChatGPT, and that's where our buyers are doing their research. If I'm a B2B buyer, I'll do 80 percent of my research before ever reaching out to a salesperson, and I'll do that with an LLM.”
That means if your brand is not legible to an AI model, you are now invisible at the exact moment the shortlist gets written.
Fredrik’s read on where AI generated content can settle (particularly interesting given his position at LinkedIn): Platforms will get smarter at spotting purely AI-generated content and quietly downrank it, and the value moves to the things a model cannot fake, the creativity and the gut feeling that comes from twenty years in a category, the person who looks at an idea and knows it is right.
On AI I also keep returning to Stefan Sagmeister (Apple Podcast / Spotify), designer, two-time Grammy winner, one of the most-invited TED speakers alive, who refused to flatter the technology.
“To do it faster and cheaper, I can see how that would be productive for society, but it's not very interesting. We could already do this, now we can do it faster. It becomes interesting when we use AI to do things we literally couldn't do before.
So far, people who did great work before AI are doing great work with AI, and people who sucked before are still sucking.”
AI raises the floor.
It does not hand anyone a ceiling.
And we already know it is making most marketers worse at their jobs.
Next up: The structural conversation about 3 big shifts in marketing, was with Andreas Cieslar (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), IAA Austria Marketer of the Year 2025 and Head of Marketing at Donau Versicherung/Danube Insurance.
“Reach has no moral value. It’s an amplifier. We fell in love with quantity, and we forgot about the quality side. The important question is not only how many people we can reach, but what exactly we are amplifying. Quantity becomes a moral alibi, a way of saying the system optimised it, the algorithm recommended it, the performance metric proved it, so you give away your responsibility, and it slowly disappears into dashboards.”
What I found insightful about this:
Marketers and media people decide every single day what becomes visible and what disappears into irrelevance, which makes reach a position of real power before it is a metric. And we’ve spent a decade optimising for the one number that carries no moral weight. Quantity, as he said, became the alibi.
Which is exactly why the following four shifts matter.
📵 Algorithmic Exhaustion Escape
In the first chapter of FRICTION RELOADED I argued that more and more consumers are tired of algorithmic media (I stopped calling it social, because I no longer see my friends there) and that we are quietly opting out.
Sandra Stichauner, CMO of the Austrian National Tourist Office (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), ran the cleanest marketing example I have seen. Their NDA (Non Disclosure Austria) campaign blurred the country’s most beautiful landscapes and made people sign a (fake) non-disclosure agreement to unlock more than 120 hidden gems. Underneath the mechanic sits her bigger argument about what brands need to consider:
“People don’t care about brands. They don’t care about if they love the brand. They care about the feeling when they use the brand, and whether it makes their life easier or not. So I think we have a shift coming from love brands to like life brands, being relevant in your life, being relevant in the life of our target audience.”
David Dittrich, Head of Marketing at Ö3 (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), is building the antidote to unauthentic content into the product itself. While everyone races to add AI, he is doubling down on being human:
“We have real humans 24/7 sitting there, there is no AI talking to you, so we are unmistakably human, and that is one of the biggest advantages we see in the coming years with all this AI showing up. We want to establish a coherent human audio ecosystem, not just linear radio, but podcasts and our own content too. The vision is to be the most human audio entertainment brand out there.”
🧘 The Search for Meaning
In uncertain times people reach for things that hold them. The marketing version is the question of what you actually leave a person with.
Christian Schneider, Director of Digital Marketing at Manner (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), works for a 140-year-old love brand where strangers tell him their childhood Manner story unprompted. But they also have to go with the current of times:
“There is the heritage angle, there is the tradition angle, but this stands as a stamp of approval when it comes to quality. Our tradition is a quality assurance, and in times of uncertainty right now, strong brands are an anchor point for people. Wherever you are, whatever situation you are in, however old you are, this is the quality one… But:
In Greek, nostalgia means the pain of the wounds from the past. So I always try to reframe it: If you only stick to what has been in the past and try to recreate that, you completely fail to conquer the challenges that are coming in the future.”
🥇 IRL is the New Gold
This is the trend that excited me the most and also the one most client sessions center around. Probably because it opens up rooms for creativity and trying out something new (and analogue).
Magdalena Horejs, strategist at Scholz & Friends (Apple Podcasts / Spotify) named the gap from inside the usual agency model.
“The brief is never about give people a true experience. It’s about we want to sell our products. But where are we creating moments that cannot be replicated by any other brand?”
She is not the only one who walked back toward the room. Fredrik’s IAA runs on dinners and Soho-House-style memberships you have to earn your way into, and Christian’s Manner is staging its first big club event this year, sitting members down together in person.
Everyone, independently, arrived there.
💚 Green Inside
This is the chapter that changed most in six months. The clearest version of the lesson is a case I wrote up separately: Red Wing, the American bootmaker, sells a lifelong warranty, about the most sustainable thing a shoe company can do, and never says the word once.
Six sustainability leaders, separately, confirmed the same instinct:
Stop leading with sustainability, lead with what people actually want.
Viktoriia Siedova, co-founder of The Good Plastic Company (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), whose recycled material furniture sits inside Nike stores and McDonald’s restaurants, said it cleanly.
“Sustainability is a nice door opener, because we’re talking to designers and architects who want to tell a story. But then you go to the operational people, and they’re looking at the prices. Sustainability is just an add-on, and people consider it should already be built in, rather than some standalone feature you’re selling. It probably transforms into durability now, because if you build something that lasts longer, that is also sustainable.”
In her world sustainability opens the door but never closes the deal, so the material has to win on durability, design and a price that matches anything else on the table.
Verena Kitowski, marketing team manager at Fairphone (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), lived the proof: In their 2025 repositioning they changed nothing about the sustainability, they are still the category leader, they simply put longevity and the product first:
“We really shifted the narrative to not put sustainability first anymore, but actually put our products first, put longevity first. And the interesting thing for me is we didn't change anything in terms of the sustainability. We're still the leader in that field, we keep innovating and pushing the bar, it's just that we don't lead in all of the communication with that anymore.”
Instead they focus on longevity and the Lime button on the Fairphone 6, a physical switch into a calmer phone, sells digital detox, and the sustainability rides underneath (linked to the Algorithmic Exhaustion Escape as well as Search for Meaning of FRICTION RELOADED).
For Laura Lamard, global B2B marketing leader at Henkel (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), sustainability lives in the business itself, deeper than the communications:
“If you manage to reduce the leaks of hydrogen with your solution, then you are sustainable, you are bringing sustainability and safety at the same time.
The messaging goes under each umbrella, so sustainability is embedded in the campaign, in the product, in the application, it's logically integrated to what we do. B2B doesn't seem obvious when it comes to sustainability, but it's actually core to the customer's target.”
Her Loctite Pulse work generated a quarter of the line’s revenue over five years, with sustainability embedded in the solution rather than bolted onto the campaign.
Her colleague Seza Eraydin, sustainability manager at Henkel (Apple Podcasts / Spotify) explained the three focus areas for their sustainability agenda: Climate, Circularity and Safety. And of course a company like theirs has a huge impact, so I was listening closely when she talked about their strategic pillars and their contribution.
“I'm a bit pessimistic for the short term, but in the long term I believe sustainability will be high on our global agendas again.
We have not changed anything about our climate targets. Maybe the communication is a bit softer now, we do it mostly in the background. From an ambition perspective nothing has changed, we keep doing the work, we are just not communicating it as loudly.”
Sven Pöllauer, Head of PR, Marketing and Public Affairs at ÖBB (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), is responsible for Austria’s most sustainable product by default, the national railways company, and still insisted on the perspective every impact company should have.
“The economical side, the business side is very important also when we are proud to be a sustainable, a green company. If you don’t earn any money, you cannot be a successful, sustainable green company.
That’s an important lesson. And that’s what I would say also to startups and other companies. It’s very good to have a product which is good for the environment, but you also have to be successful when it comes to business.”
He also warned that painting the world in black and white pushes people away from sustainability rather than toward it.
And Philippe Schuler (Apple Podcasts / Spotify), author of The Wise Man and the Story of Plenty, gave the communication frame a name. His future of marketing is two words: “green trusting”.
“So really building that, not being afraid to say something that you're doing good, but also making sure that you don't say something that is just not true. Finding that middle ground and building trust through your sustainability initiatives and the way you work. So I think that for me is marketing of the future.”
⏭️ What I am taking forward
I am happy FRICTION RELOADED was right on track.
What fascinates me is, how consistent the move underneath all four shifts turned out to be. In nearly every conversation the winning play was less - so focus.
Brands opting out of the algorithmic feed and seeding on Reddit, newsletters and Twitch instead.
Pulling the AI voice back out of the product to stay unmistakably human.
Taking the screen away and putting people in a room. Stripping the gimmicks so the thing that actually holds a person, the feeling, the quality, is what's left.
Dropping the word sustainability and letting durability, longevity and price carry the pitch.
Thirteen leaders kept arriving at the same conclusion, that the growth now comes from friction, and from giving the audience the real thing again - something they feel and really remember.
That is also the harder discipline, because adding is easy and every dashboard rewards it, while focus forces a point of view about what actually matters to the person on the other end, which is the one thing no algorithm and no model will hand you.
Finally, almost everyone I spoke to was a bit pessimistic about the next year BUT optimistic about the next ten. And we know that nobody ever built anything from the pessimistic version, so I am keeping the optimism and the work.
Have a wonderful summer, and I will see you on the other side of it.
PS: If you want the future of marketing mapped onto your brand and your next campaign, that something I can help you with. Just get in touch with me.
Until soon,