Oatly CEO Admits ‘Climate Doom’ Marketing Has Backfired as Sales Plummet
Oatly, the Swedish oat-milk darling once hailed as the future of ‘ethical capitalism’, has finally said the quiet part out loud.
In its latest earnings call, CEO Jean-Christophe Flatin admitted that the company’s climate messaging had backfired. Years of what he called “doom and gloom” talk about sustainability have left customers feeling fatigued and even hostile to the prospect of purchasing more sustainable products.
Sales in the US, Oatly’s biggest market, have dropped considerably. It turns out that terrifying people into buying oat milk isn’t a sustainable business model.
For years, Oatly has treated advertising as a form of activism. Its billboards didn’t sell a product; they scolded a population. “It’s like milk, but made for humans,” sneered one campaign. Others warned of environmental collapse, animal cruelty and corporate greed. It was less about oat milk and more about moral superiority.
The truth that marketers can’t face: no one wants to be lectured by their latte. They’re tired of the sermons, the hashtags and the ‘save the planet’ self-importance.
They just want something that tastes decent, doesn’t cost a fortune and lasts longer than the walk home from Tesco.
And let’s be honest, even if you did buy the moral lecture, you might not survive the product. Oatly is made with industrial seed oils, emulsifiers and synthetic vitamins that your grandmother wouldn’t recognise as food. These so-called ‘plant-based’ concoctions are a triumph of marketing over nutrition.
There’s more chemical engineering in a carton of oat milk than in a can of engine oil. Instead of preaching about saving the planet, Oatly might start by worrying about the health of the people drinking its product.
The industry’s justification, of course, is ‘the science’. Every claim about carbon footprints or methane emissions is presented as gospel truth. But science isn’t a religion, it’s a process. It evolves, it argues, it doubts. When brands declare the science ‘settled’, what they really mean is that debate has been banned.
Even within climate science, the data are less apocalyptic than the slogans suggest. Global CO2 levels have risen, and so crop yields are up, vegetation cover is expanding and humanity is living longer lives than ever before. You don’t need to be a climate sceptic to see the disconnect between evidence and hysteria. But that nuance doesn’t sell T-shirts or plant milks, so it gets ignored.
The biggest myth in marketing today is that people buy ‘sustainable’ products out of principle. They don’t. They say they do, in surveys, when they want to sound like good citizens, but when they reach for their wallets, price and quality still win every time.
Recent research from Imperial College London supports this: in six studies across the UK, US and Brazil, consumers consistently overlooked environmental sustainability when buying everyday goods, focusing instead on price, brand and appearance. In other words, even when people care about the environment, they rarely act on it.
Even those who still believe in man-made climate change don’t want to feel manipulated. They know greenwashing when they see it. Every brand now claims to be ‘Net Zero’, ‘planet positive’ or ‘ethically sourced’. The words have been emptied of meaning and Oatly’s falling US sales prove it.
The lesson here is simple: brands should stop trying to fix the world and get back to serving their customers. Selling oat milk, razors, shoes or airline seats is not an act of political virtue. It’s commerce. And commerce works best when it’s honest.
If companies spent half as much time improving their products as they do performing moral purity, they wouldn’t need to lecture anyone. The public can smell insincerity a mile off and they’re finally walking away from it.
So yes, Oatly’s crisis is self-inflicted. But it’s also a warning to every other boardroom chasing the next ESG headline. The age of climate preaching is over. The only sustainable strategy left is common sense.
Lee Taylor is CEO and Founder of marketing agency Uncommon Sense.
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