Read Marketing for the Lulz

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Maybe you see a funny ad for diapers. Your sister’s just had a baby, and you share the ad in the family group chat. “All of a sudden, there’s a bond formed through this piece of advertising.” And it goes beyond “here, buy this thing,” Ali says.

Without that (hopefully imaginary) group-chat tracking pixel, traditional marketing metrics won’t necessarily be of much use.

“But what did you solve for the customer?” Ali asks. “Those are the real results.” The more we can focus on that, “the better we’ll be as marketers.”


Lesson 5: Don't let growth marketing dominate your strategy
A favorite rant of Brendan Lewis (EVP of global communications and public affairs for Oatly) 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 armenia phone number material 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.