I don’t drink coffee or milk really, so haven’t been that much exposed to Oatly, but the company continues to make milky waves. Last week Oatly did its IPO and performed well to say the least. It shows it’s leading the way in plant based milk alternatives, much at the expense of soy milk that has been losing territory over the last year. The company is almost single handedly pushing the entire category by not focusing on the product as such, but on its purpose of CO2 reduction, even during a superbowl ad. So as the CO2 continues to increase, so will the Oatly growth, according to solid data analysis that merely took minutes. How? By looking into the company’s past actions using Share of Search and Social Listening data. It’s a great way to obtain competitor or market data as part of strategy building. Here are the simple steps for digging into it, using the case of Oatley within its category.

Step 1: what is the general trend?

Once you decide what you wanted to investigate and who to compare to, you want to first understand what the general trend is. In our example we wanted to look at the alternative milk category, how it move and what role Oatly played in it. Using Share of Search as a proxy, we can see the following things:

The category average is pretty flat. This doesn’t mean that the category isn’t growing, cause we know it is, but it means that the average of all alternatives is growing at the same pace.
Oatmilk is taking over from soy-milk. Looking at the overall trends, there is a small decrease for soy milk starting at 33% a year ago and moving to 27% one year later. It’s small, but definitely going down.
Oatly is definitely driving the general trend forward and moving upwards. There is of course some overlap with oatmilk, but you can see that Oatly specifically moved from 22% to 27% in over a year.

Step 2: when did the needle move?

There is no point in digging into every day of the period you want to investigate. Instead focus on the times there really was an impact. We look at Share of Search to investigate when people were triggered enough to actively go looking for your brand specifically. In this case, they would specifically look for Oatly. There are clearly bumps in July 2020, September 2020 and February 2021.

Step 3: why did the needle move?

Search doesn’t always show you why the needle moved, which is why we combine it with social listening. Was there any particular topic people talked about that triggered this search increase and was it positive or negative? In our example we see indeed that there were increased activities in news and on social media during those periods. At particular those periods we mentioned you see a bump in media activity.

July 2020: we can see there is an increase in particularly oat and soy milk, showing the coverage of Oatly is driven by general news about alternative milks. Oatly is also often mentioned as example, which is why it outperforms the others.
September 2020: using the trending topics in My Telescope, in combination with Google news, we could identify that it were rumors of an IPO, together with the Chinese plans to invest more in plant based food and its alternatives in general, which is why we also see some increase in “plant based”, as well as soy.
February 2021: Oatly is one of the superbowl ads and is getting a lot of attention due to its contrast with normal superbowl ads. It cause a smaller bump in the social listening, but went on for the entire month of February and surely made people start looking for the brand during that period.

Step 4: what is the concrete outtake?

Oatly is clearly driving the category by focusing on the bigger picture. It’s not necessarily talking about the flavor or the use cases of its products, but for its contribution to the environment. Looking at their communication campaigns confirms this. Depending on what type of competitor you are, it will then provide you with different scenarios. If you are a regular dairy producer, a soy producer or another producer of oat based products.

Conclusion

Within only a matter of minutes, we have been able to make a solid top analysis of the market, how it moves and what has been driving Oatly. All this with data that is rather readily available and enables you to create a clear data driven view of your competitors from the outside. Would you like to give it a try, just sign up and test it on www.mytelescope.io

Oatly takes over the world with CO2