September 24, 2026
In 1970, economist George Akerlof published a short paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics that several journals had previously turned down. It was called The Market for “Lemons”, after the American term for a used car that turns out to be a disaster.
His argument started from an ordinary situation. The person selling a used car knows what shape it is in. The buyer does not. Unable to tell a sound car from a bad one, the buyer offers a middling price, too low for anyone with a genuinely good car and generous for anyone with a poor one. The owner of the good car decides to keep it. The worst cars stay on the market, the buyer notices, and the price he is willing to pay falls further.
What makes the paper memorable is not the description of the swindle, which is as old as commerce. It is the conclusion: in a market where quality cannot be verified, honest sellers are not merely penalized, they leave. And the market, stripped of its best products, impoverishes itself. Akerlof received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001, together with Michael Spence and Joseph Stiglitz, for his work on markets with asymmetric information.
One word in European business communication has followed exactly this path over the past twenty years.
“Sustainable” has appeared on labels, catalogs, sales decks and company profiles so often that it has lost the ability to carry information. Alongside it, “green,” “eco,” “responsible” and “environmentally conscious” have worn just as thin. Not because they were false in themselves, but because they were used interchangeably by companies that had rebuilt a production line and by companies that had changed the color of a box.
The result is Akerlof's market, moved from used cars to language. A company that has genuinely shortened its supply chain, cut consumption in a department, or rewritten the criteria it uses to select suppliers owns a story worth something. But it tells that story in the same words as a company that has done nothing, and the listener has no way to tell them apart. In doubt, buyers discount everyone equally.
It is a loss that is hard to measure, because it never appears on a balance sheet. It shows up neither as reputational damage nor as a fine: it is the missing return on work that was actually done, and it falls on the very companies that did it.
On September 27, 2026, the provisions of Italian Legislative Decree 30/2026 come into force. The decree transposes European Directive (EU) 2024/825 and amends the Italian Consumer Code. The decree itself entered into force in March; the new rules become operative at the end of September.
In substance, the legislator has taken the standalone adjective out of play. Generic expressions such as “environmentally friendly” or “ecological” can no longer be used by anyone unable to demonstrate recognized environmental performance, and the supporting information has to travel with the claim, on the same medium, not in a document a reader has to go looking for.
One point is worth clarifying, because most summaries circulating this week miss it: the decree governs communications addressed to consumers. It amends the Consumer Code, which regulates commercial practices toward the general public, not dealings between businesses.
It would be hasty, though, to conclude that B2B sits outside all this. A company supplying a component to a business that then communicates to the end market is, in practice, the origin of the evidence that business will have to produce. Demand for documentation travels back up the supply chain: it already happened with product certifications, and it is happening now with sustainability reporting.
There is a real difference between stating a result and describing a process.
A claim is an isolated endpoint: a percentage, a label, a line at the bottom of a page. Whoever receives it can believe it or not, with nothing in between. The account of a practice contains everything needed to judge it: the need it grew out of, who carried it forward inside the company, how the work was organized, how long it took, how hard it was to get adopted, what measurable results it produced. The reader is not asked to trust: there is enough to form a judgment, and where useful, to copy the approach.
aDoormore is built on that difference. Every practice published there is made up of stated needs, the people involved, work phases, difficulties encountered and results recorded. The structure is not a form to fill in; it is the shape a good practice naturally takes when it is described in full to someone who might want to adopt it.
From this follows something that speaks directly to Akerlof's problem. Where every claim sounds like every other claim, the only thing that truly distinguishes is verifiable substance. Companies that have done the work stop being indistinguishable from those that merely said so, and recover the return on an investment they had already made.
September 27 does not create this need. It gives it a date.
By the Marketing Team
