If you’re drinking an oat milk latte as you read this, you’re in luck.
Read on to find out the secret sauce (er-milk?) of Oatly’s killer guerilla marketing strategy.
Find out why a global creative director fired an entire marketing department, why Oatly is a big fan of posting his lawsuits online, and Brendan Lewis’s belief that growth marketing needs to be “neutered, if not completely destroyed.”
Lesson 1: Put creatives first.
Brendan Lewis, Oatly’s EVP of global communications and public relations, says it all started when chief creative officer John Schoolcraft was tasked with turning a small Swedish dairy company into a global sensation.
His first step towards world domination? Firing 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 seizing the moment and allows them to be more transparent with people.
A prime (and hilarious) example: when the Spanish dairy lobby sued Oatly over its 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 of their bad comments and negative comments in one place.
It’s like Yelp’s one-star reviews had a baby with Reddit’s worst trolls, curated by Oatly himself.
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 to call and report your displeasure.
He didn’t conduct any of it legally.
“And now,” he concludes with a mischievous grin, “When our marketing fails, 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.
Lewis’ favorite rant 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 refine their emails for click-through rates, Lewis says they’re leaving out an essential ingredient: emotion.
“If you water down your message to optimize it for clicks, you’ll lose your soul,” he tells me without an ounce of grandiosity. “Emotions and conviction must be present. It’s not just someone looking at email click-through rates all day.”
(Got it – I’ll stop obsessing over the subject of this email…)
For Oatly, that means taking the leap without first testing it to death. Like in 2023, when the company bought billboards in Times Square to proudly endorse 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 happens to sell oat milk; it is not a product company in pursuit of a mission. Therefore, its leaders can act on instinct and hunch as long as they know their messages serve their broader goal of promoting sustainability.
Lesson 3: Good marketing is like freefalling from space.
When asked which brand he looks to for inspo, Lewis was quick to reply: 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 are all about lifestyle and people jumping from space. They get people talking.”
They do, and so does Oatly. And while we may not all be able to find the budgets (or adrenaline junkie volunteers, for that matter) to throw people off the edge of space, there’s something to be said for pushing the boundaries of our marketing campaigns to connect with people emotionally… CTRs be damned .
