If you’re sipping an oat milk latte as you read this, you’re in luck.
Read on to learn the secret sauce (er–milk?) of Oatly’s killer guerrilla marketing strategy.
Find out why a global creative director fired an entire marketing department, why Oatly is a big fan of posting their lawsuits online, and Brendan Lewis’s belief that growth marketing needs to be “neutered, if not completely destroyed.”
Lesson 1: Put creatives first.
Brendan LewisOatly’s EVP of global communications and public affairs, says it all started when global creative director John Schoolcraft was tasked with turning a small Swedish dairy company into a global sensation.
His first step towards world domination? Laying off the entire marketing department.
He then took over the creative department and put them at the heart of the business. The creative team is involved in everything from sales meetings to supply chain meetings.
Lewis says this allows his team at Oatly to ignore traditional marketing tactics in favor of eating in the moment and allows them to be more transparent with people.
Prime (and hilarious) example: When The Spanish dairy lobby sued Oatly over an ad that said: ‘It’s like milk, but made for people’, Oatly didn’t defend itself. She just posted the entire lawsuit online.
Or, my personal favorite: FckOatly.com — Oatly’s website dedicated to collecting all their bad press and negative comments in one place.
It’s like Yelp one-star reviews had a baby with the worst Reddit trolls, self-curated by Oatly.
Lewis tells me that the FckOatly.com meetings were some of the funniest of his career. There are countless permutations of FckOatly.com (like FckFckOatly.com, and on, and on) and if you follow it all the way through, you’ll find a phone number you can call to register your displeasure.
He didn’t conduct any of it according to the law.
“And now,” he concludes with a mischievous smile, “when our marketing doesn’t come, it’s just more content for FckOatly.com. So everybody wins, even when we lose.”
Lesson 2: Don’t let growth marketing dominate your strategy.
A favorite quip of Lewis’s is his belief that growth marketing should be “neutered, if not completely destroyed.”
“It’s nothing more than spreadsheet marketing,” he tells me. When marketers buy clicks and hone their emails for click-through rates, Lewis says they’re missing a key ingredient: emotion.
“If you’re watering down your message to optimize it for clicks, you’re losing your soul,” he tells me without a hint of grandiosity. “Emotion and belief must be there. It can’t just be someone looking at email click-through rates all day.”
(Got it – I’ll stop obsessing over the subject of this email…)
For Oatly, this means an untested jump to the death. Like in 2023 when the company bought billboards in Times Square to proudly confirm its climate label. (The Oatly team invited the dairy industry to join them. They declined.)
The secret sauce? Oatly is a mission-driven company that sells oat milk; it is not a product-driven company in search of a mission. Thus, its leaders can act on impulse and hunch as long as they know their message serves their larger goal of promoting sustainability.
Lesson 3: Good marketing is like freefalling from space.
When asked which brand he looks to for inspiration, Lewis quickly answered: Red Bull.
Affectionately known as “a heart attack in a can”.
Lewis’s eyes light up when he talks about them: “They don’t do product marketing. They’re all about lifestyle and people jumping from space. They get people talking.”
They work, and so does Oatly. And while we may not all be able to find the budget (or adrenaline junkie volunteers, for that matter) to throw people from the edge of spacethere’s something to be said for pushing the boundaries of our marketing campaigns to connect with people emotionally… CTRs be damned.
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/marketing-lessons-from-oatly
