How Oatly Wins: Stories that Create Binding Commitments

The difference between branding and storytelling, and why it matters now more than ever

The question is so absurd that it immediately feels like a trick (spoiler: it is!): rank the following 2021 IPOs in order of how much money they made on the first day of trading:

• Squarespace. That essential tool for the creator economy.
• ZipRecruiter. The ubiquitous (to podcast listeners) job recruitment site.
• Oatly. The 28-year-old Swedish company that sells a milk substitute made from oats.

Sure, enough, it’s that last one, the oat milk company, that actually did better than Squarespace and ZipRecruiter combined, raising well over a billion dollars on a $10B valuation. (Squarespace’s valuation was $7.4B, ZipRecruiter’s $2.4B.) How can that be? How many people want oat milk? And how many will buy Oatly’s as opposed to the 5,000 other brands available now in even the most conventional of supermarkets? Are there really more oat-milk lovers than creators who want an easy-to-build website or companies that need to hire the right person?

Well, Oatly did a bunch of things that very few ambitious companies do. They broke many of the well-accepted rules of branding and marketing and sales. They did it by creating a fairly complex brand—more of a story, than a brand, as we’ll see—that takes a while to understand. But, once understood, creates a degree of passionate engagement that more traditional approaches can’t achieve.

Since this is the first issue of Masterful Storytelling, I want to make clear at the top:

As the name suggests, this is not a newsletter about valuations or IPOs or stocks. It is about storytelling, specifically how companies and people can tell their story in a way that allows them to find their most passionate audience. But I have been informed that any tech-adjacent newsletter must start with some details of a unicorn IPO and Oatly’s just happens to be a perfect example of the story I want to tell. Oatly is the best example I’ve found, so far, of a major, global company that recognizes that we are leaving the age of Branding and entering the age of Storytelling.

Branding is the thing we’re used to. Branding is what Squarespace is up to: super simple imagery and messaging that is trying to appeal to as many people as possible. They literally say they can do everything to sell anything. This is broad and simple and it has that S icon we all now know.