The expensive face

More ecological economy without hot marketing air -
a study by the Entrepreneurship Foundation

We can reduce our resource consumption worldwide by 5 to 10 percent without sacrificing anything. Except for parts of the marketing. This is the result of the study “The Expensive Note” by the Entrepreneurship Foundation.

This study examines for the first time how big the “marketing rucksack” is that the products are burdened with. This term, coined by the founder of the foundation Prof. Günter Faltin based on the "ecological rucksack", describes those marketing expenses that are incurred in addition to the production costs and bringing the product to market. "The easiest way to achieve a better, gentler, more ecological world is to let unnecessary marketing air out of the prices," says Prof. Faltin.

The study, written by Prof. Christian Kreiss and Detlef Gürtler, comes to the conclusion that this marketing backpack in Germany is around 200 to 400 billion euros - and globally it is in the order of 5000 billion dollars. In precisely this order of magnitude, between 5 and 10 percent of GDP, lies the potential to reduce national and global economic output and resource consumption. Not once and painfully, as in the pandemic, but permanently and gently.

Huge step towards a sustainable economy

A ten percent reduction in resource consumption without sacrificing would be a huge step on the way to a sustainable economy - even if only a step. "In a world without superfluous marketing, we would no longer consume the resources of 1.7 earths, but of 1.5 earths," says study co-author Detlef Gürtler. "Earth Overshoot Day would then not be on July 29, like this year, but about three weeks later."

The marketing backpack is naturally particularly large for branded products that are advertised intensively. Coca-Cola and Nivea-Creme, among others, were examined in the study. The result: at Nivea, this backpack is about twice as big as the actual production costs, at Coca-Cola even three times as high.

The expensive bill - the complete study in PDF