Growth Newsletter #194

Oatly asked a kind of dumb question.

“How can we sell oat milk to people who don’t drink it or want to drink it?”

Aren’t we supposed to sell to people who actually want your product?

But by doing so, instead of going after the small market of not-milk drinkers, they went after the gigantic market of cow milk drinkers. And they did that with bold branding, going after baristas, and some insane marketing campaigns.

Last week we talked about how companies in boring categories (like oat milk) need to either keep it super simple (puppies on a toilet paper package) or need to make it interesting by being over the top fun/ridiculous. Oatly has taken the over the top route. 

Let’s highlight 3 of their most clever campaigns:

It’s like milk but for humans + F*CK OATLY

This is one of Oatly’s primary marketing messages—subtly reminding people how odd it is that we drink milk intended for baby cows:

These ads got Oatly banned or sued in countries like Ireland and Spain with influential dairy unions.

In response, they created fckoatly.com, pretending to be anti-Oatly:

They didn’t stop there; they made various satirical sites pretending to hate the anti-Oatly or anti-anti-Oatly sites. Here’s fckfckoatly.com:

They go all the way to fckfckfckfckfckoatly.com until they ask you to call a number.

The Dairy Deal

Next, they went after the dairy industry’s climate impact by buying billboards and print ads like this all over the place:

They’re challenging the dairy industry

And if you go to the URL in the corner (oatly.com/DairyDeal), it takes you to a full site pitching the deal to dairy reps (actual deal with up to 140k GBP value):

Note: I think it would have benefitted them if they published the number somewhere in the marketing since otherwise people wouldn’t really know these stats:

Paris cleverness

Paris has some funny laws. 

A mural advertisement can’t contain both text and an image of the product. So they painted a bunch of bold, text-only murals, and then cleverly positioned objects in front of the walls to complete the picture:

To dive more into some of Oatly’s top ads, I’ve compiled them into a carousel.