Three years ago Unilever's reset would have generated a week of outraged LinkedIn posts. By 2026 it reads more like a building code update — procedural and already priced in by everyone except the people who wrote the original targets. Under Hein Schumacher, Unilever cut its virgin-plastic reduction target from 50% to 30%, pushed packaging deadlines to 2030-2035, and dropped its 2030 living-wage commitment entirely. It is a doctrine-level reversal at the company that did more than any other to institutionalise purpose-led branding. The EU's Empowering Consumers for the Green Transition Directive takes effect in September 2026 and bans words like "sustainable," "green," and "eco-friendly" in consumer-facing claims unless substantiated with lifecycle evidence.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority got there first: in December 2025 it pulled Google ads from Nike, Lacoste, and Superdry for using "sustainable materials" and "sustainable clothing" without adequate proof. Lacoste had lifecycle assessments, organic cotton certifications, and a measured 19% improvement in raw-material impact. The ASA banned the ad anyway. Lacoste told the regulator that terms like "sustainable" are "very difficult to substantiate." That sentence is the whole era in miniature.

The instinct has been to read this as retreat. It isn't, mostly. GlobeScan's 2025 data shows that the share of consumers who reported seeing sustainability messaging from brands fell from 49% in 2023 to 36%. At the same time, around 85% of large companies are maintaining or increasing their sustainability spending. They are doing roughly the same work but saying considerably less about it — a behaviour now labelled "greenhushing," which sounds like a communications trend but is really a legal risk calculation. The problem is that silence erodes trust too: consumer confidence in sustainability messages dropped from 79% in 2022 to 65% in 2025. Brands that stopped talking to avoid being called greenwashers are now assumed to have nothing to say.

The consumer side is subtler than either camp admits. PwC reports an average willingness to pay a 9.7% premium for sustainably produced goods, which sounds like a mandate until you notice how it distributes. Deloitte finds the premium holds in low-cost, frequent-purchase categories — oat milk, soap, coffee — and weakens sharply for expensive, infrequent ones. Euromonitor adds that nearly 40% of consumers globally cite higher price as the main barrier. What this describes is not a values collapse but a daily budgeting exercise: people will absorb a sustainability premium on one item and offset it by choosing the cheapest option on the next three.

Unilever's old model assumed you could build a corporate story around purpose and let it radiate downward into brands. The new operating assumption is the reverse: proof has to start at the product, and the only claims worth making are the ones narrow enough to survive a regulator reading them literally.