Everyone knows Oatly, even those who don’t drink oat milk know Oatly. But why is that? The answer of course, is truly great marketing.
Famously provocative and at times downright antagonistic, the upstart Swedish brand famously doesn’t even have a marketing department, instead leaving every aspect of its campaigns to the creative team.
In some ways this allows its campaigns and communications to be refreshingly agile, with no marketing suits to answer to – but it also opens the door to other complications. The blend of no-frills simplicity and authenticity with a bold twist has placed a rather large target on the brand’s back.
Speaking at Advertising Week Europe 2024, the Malmo-based firm’s global chief creative officer, John Schoolcraft addressed these controversies in a typically laid-back, almost dismissive fashion.
On Oatly’s famous ‘Milk, but made for humans’ campaign that drew the ire of the Swedish cow’s milk lobby, Schoolcraft said: “We put that out into the world and the evil Swedish dairy lobby sued us!
“I thought it was really funny – a 174-page lawsuit comes down on the table and I just laughed because a team of lawyers spent all summer draughting a 13,000-word suit.”
It is precisely this kind of attitude that helped Oatly become so successful – it even went on to incorporate the lawsuit in future campaigns, to great avail.
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Schoolcraft goes on to praise the dairy-free brand’s utter ‘fearlessness’ for its unqualified success, noting that without the restrictions and time constraints placed upon it by a bottom-line obsessed marketing department, Oatly’s creative team has been able to thrive, ensuring that each campaign results entirely from their output without any outside factors.
Adopting this fearless attitude is what supercharged Oatly from a middling Swedish alternative brand into an international powerhouse that now enjoys significant cut through across large swathes of Western Europe, including of course the UK.
“As brand we tend to live in fear: What do the bosses think? What does the client think? Our whole thing was that we needed to be as good a company as possible,” Schoolcraft continues.
“We wanted to be as open, transparent and honest as possible, and we needed to be fucking fearless. The first time we got sued we really got put to the test. They said our ‘Milk, but made for humans’ line made cow’s milk seem old fashioned!”
This fearless attitude has continued to be infused in all of Oatly’s brand work to date – even in the setting up of the infamous ‘Fuck Oatly’ website which listed all of the controversies that it had been involved in – as well as a curated selection of hater comments.
Oatly is a brand that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and that outlook is precisely why it’s done so well over the last decade.
Its refreshing, give-no-shits strategy has clearly paid dividends and the public are lapping it up. With oat milk only set to become more relevant over the coming decades as more carbon-friendly alternative to cow’s milk, it would seem that for now – the sky’s the limit for Oatly.
2 Comments. Leave new
Never heard of them. Looks like milk for Tree Huggers
cool story BRO