Why Oatly’s marketers prefer cultural signals to focus groups

Oatly, the oat milk brand, however, is taking a different approach – one that’s looser, more intuitive and built to serve the people actually shaping the brand. It’s less about rigid frameworks and more about staying closer to culture, listening in real time. 

And it’s doing this through its work with cultural intelligence platform CultureLab – tapping into live conversations, media narratives, emerging behaviors and other messy, unfiltered signals that traditional research often misses. Some of that data comes from social platforms, sourced through various partners. These data sets are treated like qualitative inputs, in so far as they’re analyzed not for volume per se but for nuance – the language people use, the emotions behind it and the cultural undercurrents that can shape how a brand like Oatly shows up in the world. 

“Oatly are right to see that culture moves a lot faster than monthly reports. Traditional brand research tells you where consumers were six months ago,” said James Kirkham, co-founder of brand consultancy Iconic. “Real-time cultural intelligence tells you where they’re heading tomorrow.”

By parsing this information, CultureLab’s proprietary AI spots the values, rituals, traditions and iconography Oatly’s marketers can act on – not months later but while they’re still taking shape. Whether it’s a campaign, a branding decision or production innovation, the goal is the same: to move in sync with culture, not behind it, said Sarah Sutton, Oatly’s global media and brand partnerships director.

Take the matcha craze, for instance. Matcha lattes, matcha cheesecake, matcha donuts – the green powder has exploded in popularity, even triggering a global shortage. Naturally, Oatly’s marketers have had it on their radar for some time but with regular updates from CultureLab, they can make sharper, more timely calls about where its headed next. That helps them gauge whether their own innovation pipeline should lean into the trend – or pull back if signs point to it cooling off. 

It’s the same with prebiotic sodas. The category is riding a wave of hype and Oatly is using CultureLab to track whether that momentum is building into something lasting – or just another health fad passing through.

“We’re looking at these trends as they happen, but are also trying to look at how they might manifest or change or even divest into something new and different,” said Sutton. “That doesn’t mean we’ve cracked it. Really, we’re just at the very start of our relationship so it’s going to evolve over time.”

What it takes for that intel to actually translate into action is harder to pin down. This is, after all, a company still learning how to interpret and apply these kinds of signals. Still, the starting point tends to be the same: ideas that are unusual, entertaining and a little offbeat – often flying in the face of category conventions. 

“We work so fast as a team, where we have everyone who needs to be in a room together talking about the work, it meant there wasn’t a lot of room for additional insight and information,” said Sutton. “Often it wasn’t required.”

That mindset has gradually started to shift, especially since Oatly went public four years ago. It just needed the right partner. When the company first started working with CultureLab a year ago, the insights were delivered in the form of a zine. The team’s aversion to PDFs and PowerPoint meant CultureLab tailored its output to fit Oatly’s culture – turning data into a narrative, and analysis into story, said Jed Hallam, CultureLab’s founder..

What started as four or five chapters of research delivered each quarter has since evolved into a much faster feedback loop. Now, intel flows in monthly – sometimes even faster – giving Oatly’s marketers a more immediate read on cultural signals and how the brand can move in step with them.

“As we started to mature as a business we realized we needed more guidance on those [date] inputs, which CultureLab was able to do by making it all more palatable for an organization that wasn’t used to an influx of data and insight from outside,” said Sutton.

It’s a candid admission from a company that’s long prided itself on doing things differently. Oatly doesn’t have a CMO, nor does it operate with a traditional marketing department. Instead, it relies on an in-house team of specialists, creators and creative directors who work closely with general managers across Oatly’s markets. Its a setup that prizes agility and instinct but is now learning how to work with data without being boxed in by it. 

And  that evolution couldn’t come at a more urgent time. The brand – and the business – is navigating two major headwinds: growing misinformation around the health impact of oat milk and the broader uncertainty of a trade war. CultureLab won’t solve either challenge outright.

But it could help Oatly chart a clear path through the noise, surfacing the culture signals that matter, and offering a way to act on them before they turn from whispers into headlines.
“Oatly’s rejection of traditional CMO hierarchies might be smart for their business too. When you’re trying to move at the speed of culture, corporate committees can tend to kill creativity,” said Kirkham.

“I’ve been in many examples over the years where committees at the top of the tree spend so long wondering if it’s right for their brand, they miss the opportunity to have a voice at all. So a set up of embedded creators and more market-focused teams feels  exactly how brands like this should be structured to get better cultural agility.”