🌾 Oatly: Marketing Case Study - The inexplicable brand
The provocative marketing strategy Oatly uses to define its own market and create crazy campaigns. Plus: 5 top learnings for our own marketing.
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
“We are unconventional.”
These are the words by with Toni Petersson, CEO of the worldwide beloved oatmilk describes his company.
The oat milk manufacturer generated sales of over USD 783 million in 2023 and continued to grow by 3% in the last quarter of 2024.
Oatly is now a global love brand.
Also beloved by me.
As I write this, I'm drinking my coffee with their delicious barista oat milk.
But the beginning of Oatly, like that of Patagonia (the holy grail of sustainable companies), was not that big and popular.
How did Oatly achieve this marketing success? And what can we learn from it?
Let's take a look at that here today:
1️⃣ A short brand story
2️⃣ Brand strategy with provocation
3️⃣ Packaging as an advertising medium
4️⃣ Weird, inexplicable campaigns
5️⃣ 5 things we can learn from Oatly for our marketing strategy
1️⃣ A short brand story
Oatly was originally founded in 1994 by Swedish scientists at Lund University when they discovered that oats could be a nutritional alternative to cow's milk.
They saw a way to provide people with allergies or personal reasons not to drink dairy products, packaged it, put it on the shelves and Oatly was born.
However, the company did not have an easy time on the market for two decades. Consumers had difficulties with the unfamiliar taste of oat milk. Resistance from the Swedish dairy lobby did not make things any easier either.
When today's CEO Toni Petersson drank Oatly's oat milk for the first time, he was impressed by the sustainability of the production and the low sugar content. However, he says that he found drinking oats “unpleasant” and that he wasn't particularly inspired by Oatly's accompanying marketing.
But he saw potential.
After all, soy and almond milk was becoming increasingly popular.
So he decided to take over the company and target the Oatly brand at younger, trendier milk drinkers. Today, the company has found an audience among hipsters and coffee fans who appreciate the taste and sustainable production of oat milk. Oat milk has found a place in supermarkets, on the shelves of Viennese coffee houses and Spanish bodegas.
As of 2024, Oatly is the market leader in many countries.
Oatly has taken on the global dairy lobby.
And the brand is a love brand for many sustainable consumers.
Toni's rebranding of Oatly has paid off.
2️⃣ Brand strategy with provocation
Let's start with the heart of the brand.
Strategy is the way from A to B.
What is it for Oatly?
It is also the key to its success:
While many other brands define their strategy as “We want to get more consumers to drink oat milk”, Oatly went one step further and defined “We show why milk is the worse choice than Oatly” as the core of their strategy.
That's a clear vision and, as I've written here before, it's the key to success.
Oatly didn’t fight other plant-based brands. They declared war on dairy.
With this core in their brand strategy, they moved on to the next step.
The identification of core values and truths:
