To change the way commerce works requires good business practice — in all senses of the word good. Marketing is an essential part of positive change. It isn’t good enough to want to do good things for the world with your company, you also need to be a good marketer. To make a positive change you need to create a good product, to make people aware of the product, to offer it in the right places and at a decent price. Good intentions aren’t enough, marketing matters. This second post on Chris Baker’s book, Obsolete, examines ways that change brands have used superior marketing to make a difference to the world.
Marketing Is An Essential Part of Positive Change
Baker emphasizes through many examples that marketing is an essential part of positive change.
Consumer spend is the most powerful lever we have to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Moving just 1 per cent of consumer spend to Change Brands would make an enormous difference.
Baker, 2025, page 33
Liquid Death, a water brand, established itself as an alternative to plastic water bottles. The world could be made better though less use of plastic but to achieve this Liquid Death needed to ensure that their brand had a significant impact. They did that through inventive and risky marketing. E.g., Liquid Death asked customers to “Sell My Soul” in order to accept important information and offers. A change brand by its nature starts small, so it doesn’t have much to lose. It can try strategies that bigger players would see as too risky.
Even when it appears to have gone wrong, good marketing can save a strategy. When Fussy (refillable deodorant) received a lawyer’s letter about their marketing campaign they sent an olive tree to Unilever. This gained great publicity for the small brand and diffused the situation. After all, Unilever didn’t want to be seen bullying a small sustainable competitor who had said sorry.
Homeless Coffee
Baker had the idea to get homeless people to work selling coffee which would allow them to build up money, create a routine, and develop skills to help them get off the street. Yet, he saw a big marketing problem — homeless coffee doesn’t sound especially tasty.
The idea of creating something that was basically ‘homeless coffee’ didn’t really trigger great thoughts in terms of taste when compared to the competition.
Baker, 2025, page 243
So, rather than seeing this as ‘charity coffee’ he envisaged a premium brand and the link to the problem of homelessness was clever and pretty subtle. The brand, Change Please, managed to be seen as a quality brand. People weren’t being asked to tolerate a sub-standard coffee in order to feel good about themselves helping the homeless. Instead, they were offered a great coffee product that also did good, a much more compelling offer that consumers were willing to pay significant money for. Change Please coffee then got some big brands involved. Virgin Galactic plans to use Change Please coffee, not bad for relatively small brand. Why did they achieve that? High quality marketing allied with a great mission. Good business skills can make the world better.
Other Examples Of Change Brands
XO Bikes (xo for ex-offender) attaches the story of the person who made the bike with every sale made. Customers know who is being helped to get back into the workforce from their purchase.
The change brand smol, a plastic free laundry brand placed a washing machine “vomiting out plastic packs” in a major UK city to draw attention to the challenge of plastic pollution.
Oatly used its clever marketing to challenge the dairy industry to compare greenhouse gas emissions between oat milk and dairy milk. That was a competition that dairy could never hope to win and so the cow people didn’t even try. It didn’t really matter whether there was a response. With its challenge Oatly got the publicity they wanted and consumers, even if they don’t have a good understanding of emissions for most products, could see who was prepared to share their emissions and who wasn’t which gave a pretty clear indication of which was best.
Framing The Problem
When working with a change brand it is critical to be clear on the problem you are trying to solve. Oatly tackles greenhouse gas emissions from dairy, Tony’s Chocolonely targets the end of modern slavery, XO Bikes creates jobs for ex-offenders.
When marketing a change brand think of how you convey the problem you are addressing. Use simple to remember statistics. This might require a little rounding, 1 in 2 rather than 48%. A bit of simplification is okay providing it isn’t too dramatic, deceiving, or distorting. Clear messages matter, because consumers have to know that the problem you are solving is real. Then they need to know you are making, and will make, a difference. Impact matters. If you can explain the impact in a compelling way — which is after all a marketing communications problem — consumers are much more likely to respond.
For more on sustainable marketing read here, here, and here.
Read: Chris Baker (2025) Obsolete: How change brands are changing the world, Bloomsbury
