When your marketing is almost too good
Adweek features a story about Oatly’s clever positioning and marketing strategy. It is behind a paywall, so if you don’t subscribe, here is the dumbed-down version.
Oat milk is an unconventional product, so Oatly has developed an unconventional brand image to match. It has dubbed its marketing department the Oatly Department of Mind Control, and that tongue-in-cheek, wiseguy tone pervades almost all its communication.
For the last several years, it has relied upon an outdoor campaign with huge, splashy signs and billboards all over the world that are all eye-catching and self-deprecating.
There was also, of course, the “so-bad-it’s-good” Super Bowl ad from 2021.
It has created a whimsical true-crime style podcast (all about the brand’s origin story) aimed at the younger adults who form the heart of the brand’s target market.
It has tapped into a sense of community and identity by spawning a movement called “The Post Milk Generation” that doesn’t directly advertise the brand but instead quietly encourages consumers to adopt a more sustainable way of living
Oatly’s Youtube channel includes bizarre puppet stories that tell the story of living a more plant-based lifestyle.
The brand has become a content-generating machine. And it’s good content – funny, whimsical, and engaging. Consumers are buying the brand experience as much as they are the product itself. In fact, maybe they are buying it too much. Oatly is struggling to make enough product to meet demand. Marketers 1 Supply-chain nerds 0.