It’s Like Marketing, But Made for Humans: Lessons from Oatly’s EVP

If you’re sipping an oat milk latte as you read this, you’re in luck.

Keep reading to learn the secret sauce (er–milk?) to Oatly’s killer guerilla marketing strategy.

Find out why global chief creative officer fired the entire marketing department, why Oatly is a big fan of posting their lawsuits online, and Brendan Lewis’ belief that growth marketing needs to be “neutered, if not totally destroyed.” 

Lesson 1: Put creatives at the forefront.

Brendan Lewis, Oatly’s EVP of global communications and public affairs, says it all started when global chief creative officer John Schoolcraft was tasked with turning a small Swedish milk company into a global sensation.

His first step towards world domination? Firing the entire marketing department.

Then he took the creative department and put them at the center 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 feeding off 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 proclaiming, ‘It’s like milk, but made for humans‘ ad, Oatly didn’t get defensive. It just posted the entire lawsuit online.

Or, my personal favorite: FckOatly.com — Oatly’s website dedicated to gathering all their bad press and negative comments in one place.

It’s like if Yelp one-star reviews had a baby with the worst Reddit trolls, curated by Oatly themselves.

Lewis tells me the meetings about FckOatly.com were some of the most hilarious of his career. There are countless permutations of FckOatly.com (like FckFckOatly.com, and on, and on) and if you follow it to the end, you’ll find a phone number you can call to register your displeasure.

None of which he ran by legal.

“And now,” He concludes with a mischievous grin, “When our marketing doesn’t land, 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 rant of Lewis’ is his belief that growth marketing needs to be “neutered, if not totally destroyed.”

“It’s nothing more than spreadsheet marketing,” he tells me. When marketers are buying clicks and perfecting 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 lose your soul,” he tells me without a trace of grandiosity. “The emotion and the belief has to be there. It can’t just be somebody looking at email click-rates all day.”

(Got it – I‘ll stop obsessing about this email’s subject lines…)

For Oatly, this means taking the leap without testing it to death first. 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-led company that happens to sell oat milk; it’s not a product-led company in search of a mission. So its leaders are able to act on impulse and hunch as long as they know their messaging caters to their larger goal of promoting sustainability.

Lesson 3: Good marketing is like free-falling from outer space.

When asked which brand he looks to for inspo, Lewis spitfired a quick response: Red Bull.

Endearingly known as a “heart attack in a can.”

Lewis’ eyes light up when he talks about them: “They don’t do product marketing. They’re all about lifestyle and people jumping from outer space. They get people talking.”

They do, and so does Oatly. And while maybe we all can’t find the budgets (or the adrenaline-junkie volunteers, for that matter) to fling humans from 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.