Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher and this is the FUTURESTRATEGIES newsletter. Glad you’re here 💚
If you know me, you know: sustainability matters to me.
And not just personally…
After learning my marketing craft at McDonald’s, where I got to develop, produce and run major national campaigns, I switched to the green side and fulfilled a childhood dream: I worked in marketing at Greenpeace (and helped save a few whales along the way).
Before starting my own marketing studio, I spent 2.5 years as Head of Marketing at Too Good To Go, the app against food waste.
So sustainability has been part of my professional life as well, and over the last four years I’ve had the honour of advising organisations and policymakers on sustainability projects, campaigns and strategies.
But right now green marketing is having a hard time.
Economic pressure and a long list of topics that feel more urgent have made sustainability a lot less sexy.
One respondent in our latest study put it like this:
“Rather than doing something small and good, people do nothing at all, out of fear that it isn’t enough.”
One question has been on my mind for a while:
Is our industry underestimating what communicating about sustainability can do for audiences and buying behaviour?
Green marketing has been talked about a lot for years and measured very little. The debate runs on anecdotes, one-off cases and gut feeling.
To get to the bottom of it, Maximilian Mondel from MOMENTUM Wien and I launched a Green Marketing Study and surveyed almost 100 communications and marketing leaders about sustainability communication.
The Green Marketing Study is now finished, and we presented the results in Vienna this week.
➡️ The full study “Green on the Back Burner” (in German, 53 pages, PDF) is available here. Happy to translate it for you - just send me an email.
1. What the industry says when you ask
97 marketing and communications leaders in Austria answered our 31 questions in spring 2026. It is one of the most current studies to put these questions directly to the people responsible for green marketing, and the first of its kind in Austria.
Quick note on scope: Our data comes from Austria. But I believe the forces behind it don’t stop at the border. Economic pressure, the greenwashing debate and, since 27 September, the EU’s EmpCo directive apply across Europe. If you work in marketing in countries like like Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Spain or France, you will most likely recognise the pattern.
56% work in companies, 44% in agencies and media, most of them in marketing leadership, management or brand management.
The impact
68% see green marketing losing impact over the past one to two years. 0% see a clear gain.
As reasons, 62% name economic pressure and inflation, 55% distrust and the greenwashing debate.
Marketing leaders are afraid of being accused of greenwashing by watchdogs, NGOs or consumers. So they would rather say nothing at all (= greenhushing). More on that later…
64% say green marketing is seen internally as more expensive.
So it is fighting two forces at once: cost and fear.
Both explain why green marketing has gone quiet. Why it loses every budget round internally runs deeper: it comes down to a question more than half of the industry can’t answer.
In this deep dive, we look at exactly these questions:
❇️ Where does green marketing really stand today?
❇️ What are 3 strategic recommendations for your own sphere of influence?
❇️ Is the EU’s new EmpCo directive another obstacle to sustainability?