Companies that have understood § 7 UWG in Germany often assume the same rules cover the whole German-speaking market. They do not. Austria is stricter on paper, Switzerland is built around a different concept, and a DACH program that treats the three as one country will be wrong in two of them.
Austria: consent first, for businesses as well
Austria regulates unsolicited messages in § 174 of the Telekommunikationsgesetz 2021. Calls and faxes for advertising purposes require the recipient's prior consent. Electronic mail for direct advertising, which includes email and SMS, also requires prior consent, and the provision applies to business recipients as it does to consumers. Even an email asking for permission to send advertising is itself treated as advertising. The only exception is a narrow existing-customer rule: contact details obtained in connection with a sale, own similar products, a clear opt-out and no entry on the ECG Robinson list. Advertising emails must also be recognisable as such under § 6 E-Commerce-Gesetz. Violations are administrative offences with fines of up to EUR 50,000, and the rules apply wherever the message is received in Austria, regardless of where it was sent from.
Switzerland: a ban on mass advertising, not on contact
Switzerland has no equivalent of § 7 UWG. The relevant rule is Art. 3 Abs. 1 lit. o of the Swiss Bundesgesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb. It is unfair to send mass advertising by telecommunication without a direct connection to requested content unless the sender has obtained prior consent, identifies itself correctly and offers a free and simple way to refuse further messages. The law does not distinguish between business and consumer recipients. What it regulates is mass advertising: messages sent in large numbers to an unselected audience. An individually researched message to one named person about a matter relevant to that person's company is a different thing from a templated sequence to a bought list, and most practitioners treat the two differently. The boundary is not sharp, and the courts have read the concept of mass advertising broadly, so a program that sends hundreds of near-identical messages into Switzerland sits on the wrong side of it. The revised Swiss data-protection law applies alongside.
What this means for a DACH program
Germany allows a researched, justified approach by telephone and treats email as consent-bound. Austria treats both as consent-bound. Switzerland asks whether the approach is individual or mass. Three answers, three channel plans. A program entering the German-speaking market should therefore decide channel, message form and consent basis per country before the target list is built, and should keep the per-account record of why each contact was justified. The same record that satisfies a German court is the one that shows a Swiss message was not mass advertising.