Marketing lessons from Oatly, Heaps Normal, Zero Co and Pilot

Earlier this month, Inside FMCG launched the second annual Making it in Marketing report, in collaboration with Adobe, where we detailed a few of our favourite marketing campaigns from the past year and spoke to the people that made them happen.From puppet shows to tongue-in-cheek billboards, we’ve collected four of our favourite campaigns from the report, and some of the lessons the brands learned along the way. You can download a complimentary copy of the full report here.Go weird, people will remember you for itIf there’s one brand many marketers could stand to learn a lesson from, it’s Oatly. The ‘wow, no cow’ oat milk brand has made some fantastic and strange ads throughout its 30-odd years, and its latest effort shows just how weird the company can get.The ‘Norm&Al Show’, a video series expounding on the difficulties of moving from ‘regular’ milk to oat milk, takes a risk in presenting itself as a cute-but-off-kilter puppet show rather than as a straight-forward educational piece. And despite the fact that not everybody liked the campaign, everyone will remember it: and that’s the point.“Just like most things we do, a lot of people loved it, some people hated it, and the rest hopefully found it interesting enough to spend a few minutes of their life on a dorky puppet show,” Michael Lee, Oatly’s creative director on the campaign, told Inside FMCG. “At the end of the day, we’re just here to plant some seeds in people’s minds so that one day they do the mental equation and land on, ‘yeah, maybe I’ll try going plant-based today’. Might be today, might be next year, but that’s okay, because change is really hard, right?”Don’t be afraid to make mistakesSometimes, it’s easy to get caught in the cycle of calculating the potential return on investment of a particular idea and determining that it’s simply not financially feasible. Just because an idea isn’t likely to bring in sales, however, doesn’t mean it’s without merit.Australian men’s healthcare retailer Pilot took a punt earlier this year at the height of the election cycle, when they felt people were particularly done with the Liberal and Labor parties’  cheap shots at one another, and, in the space of one day, erected a billboard just outside of Sydney Airport announcing that Aussies could ‘win the next e_ection’.Admittedly, the ad “didn’t light the world on fire in terms of sales”, according to Pilot’s head of brand marketing Matt Rossi, but it created a flash-in-the-pan moment of engagement across social media at a time of stress and frustration for the Australian public, while also driving home the business’ focus on providing men with a space to talk openly about taboo health issues.“I think it was quite fulfilling to make something like this up that ended up getting outsized returns on engagement, because it’s a reminder that we should still be doing this kind of work,” Rossi told Inside FMCG. “It’s not all about bottom-of-funnel conversion, and we need to step up and out into different formats and creative ideas. In terms of how it’ll change the way we market moving forward, it’s about making sure to give the creative team enough space to explore different territories and ideas, and not just be guided by what we know has worked in the past.”Experiment with a new canvasOn the topic of trying new things, sometimes it can pay to go big, and sometimes it pays to go small. This year refillable household goods brand Zero Co launched its second major range of goods, a body care range, and wanted to tell the world. However, with a relatively limited budget, traditional outdoor advertising was simply not possible. So, the business listened to its own advice on ‘starting small’, and raised a bunch of tiny billboards all over Sydney, Melbourne, and the business’ home region of Byron Bay. The billboards had a simple message, and a QR code that could be redeemed for one of 50 boxes of free body care products. Within a few social posts, Zero Co had kick started a scavenger hunt across some of the country’s most populous cities.“Outdoor is still probably a bit out of our reach, given where we are… but doing it this way let us still have that physical component [to the launch],” Zero Co’s chief marketing officer Glen Cassidy told Inside FMCG. “I think we’re always looking to do interesting, category-pushing stuff, and it’s a category that needs it. We’re in a time when the planet needs it, so we want to do our bit there and push the envelope wherever we can, and you’ll keep seeing more of that [from Zero Co].”Know your brand, and your audienceFinally, perhaps the most important lesson is to know your brand’s voice, and its audience. Dry July is one of the most exciting times of year for non-alcoholic beer brand Heaps Normal, as its customers try to cut back on their alcohol intake for the month. However, with public anxieties at an all-time high following the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the geo-political state of affairs in the world, the business wanted to find a way to ease the pressure.Enter the brand’s ‘Do Your Best’ campaign: A message to each of its potential customers that they don’t need to be perfect, or feel that any sip of alcohol throughout July is an automatic fail. And the campaign, which highlighted people trying and in most cases struggling to do everyday things, was a hit with its audience. “We know a lot of people have the best of intentions when doing things like Dry July, but for a lot of people it’s hard to just switch off,” Heaps Normal’s marketing director Tim Snape told Inside FMCG. “I think we recognised that, coming out of Covid, there’s been a huge focus on self improvement, and everyone feeling like they have to be healthier and drink less and pick up a hobby and perfect work and relationships, and we recognised some of that through the [campaign].“The ‘Do Your Best’ message ties back into the ethos of our brand, which is about helping people to make better decisions.”