Obsolete: How Change Brands Are Reshaping the Branding World - And How Established Names Can Fight Back

A deep-dive into the world of new, dynamic ’change brands’, in order to understand their success and to show how they’re putting legacy brands under pressure.

The world needs changing. That much is clear. But how best to do it? Change how you vote? Get out and protest? Have an argument?

How our money is spent has more potential to change the world than how we vote or almost anything else we can do with our time on this planet. But the vast majority of this money currently goes to businesses that are fuelling these problems, through their packaging, formulations and practices. Just eleven companies (nine of which are in North America) own almost every brand we buy in the supermarket, raking in more than a billion dollars in sales every day. But we are on the cusp of the next major market disruption, as a rising tide of ’Change Brands’ are growing rapidly while at the same time helping to make a positive impact on the world.

Brands such as Tony’s Chocolonely, Tesla, Ecosia, Allbirds, Cheeky Panda and others have legacy brands running scared as they lose sales and customer preference. A lot of brands will become obsolete in the next decade if they don’t radically change how they do things, a realisation that is leading to a spate of ’greenwashing’, reformulations and brands trying to retrofit purpose into their brand. But Chris Baker offers such legacy brands a seven-step plan for developing an effective and powerful strategy: Impact, Improve, Create, Connect, Fame, Partner and Expand.

Obsolete takes us into their world so we can understand what’s driving their success and how they’re putting legacy brands under pressure. We will learn from a series of case studies from Change Brand founders, with the book showing that the best way to make the world’s problems obsolete is to try and do the same to the brands that are contributing to those very problems. At the very least, they’ll be forced to change the way they do things, and everyone, as well as the planet, will be better off.

Chris Baker is an award-winning advertising and social change strategist turned social entrepreneur. He is Co-Founder of Change Please, a coffee social enterprise that has helped hundreds of homeless people off the streets by training them as baristas. Change Please was named the World’s Leading Social Enterprise in 2018 and in Marketing Week’s 100 Most Disruptive Brands in the World. He is also CEO and Founder of Serious Tissues, a toilet roll business that fights climate change and deforestation by planting a tree for every roll sold.; 1.4m trees have been planted in just twenty months. He has spent 20 years working on the world’s biggest brands in the advertising and marketing sector, including Nike, Pepsico, Honda, Boots, Alpro, Sky, Nivea, Lucozade, Coors, Huawei, Oreo, Lynx, Dove and Bodyform. He has won over 100 strategic and creative awards along the way, making him one of the most awarded strategists in London.