Saving the planet through acts of consumption. Oatly’s antagonistic and playful marketing communication

Abstract

There has been an increase in food products marketed through buzzwords like ‘organic’, ‘local’, ‘recyclable’, ‘Fairtrade’. These have been described as part of a newer kind of ethical or emotional capitalism, where consumers can align with political issues through shopping. In this paper, we look at the brand Oatly, a Swedish milk alternative that has had global success. Oatly brands itself as sustainable and offers us the chance to save the planet by buying their oat milk. We carry out a critical multimodal discourse analysis of their value-based marketing communication. The results show that Oatly mixes the antagonistic and the playful and utilizes various semiotic materials in refined ways. We find signifiers of clear and direct political action from former times, for example in film clips and packaging design. The playful runs through many poster campaigns with posters that refer to each other, where we engage in a kind of hide and seek. The meta-communication that arises when Oatly says it is not advertising presents the company as an underdog going against the milk industry. Overall, this is a form of activism which is fun, chic and rather easy. Our critique of this kind of marketing communication is that acts of consumption shape what we know about, and how we act towards, actual socio-political matters. If global large companies are to control our money and feelings and decide how environmental problems are defined, we might not be able to save the planet.