Our study is about the brand Oatly, an alternative for milk- and dairy. Oatly is a brand that claims to have environment friendly and healthy products, and can therefore be connected to an ethical brand. In this study we examines what attitudes there is towards Oatly with their consumers. Which values the consumers relate to Oatly and if they use Oatly in their identity. Oatly is an ethical brand in comparison to milk- and dairy, but in our work we have seen that they are not ethical altogether, nevertheless that’s how they are perceived as, among consumers. In order to get to the attitudes, values and building of identity we chose to perform semi-structured interviews. Our selection was strategically based on young adults age 20-30, and they were or had been consumers of Oatly. The interviews followed a standardized manual with 36 questions and went on for 10-30 minutes, with a majority of 20 minutes.

To analyze our result we chose to use marketing communication, with a focus on the term brand attitude. We used 3 steps of brand attitude and also The Rossiter-Percy Grid model. We used brand personality as well. To get to the ethical and the identity we used Social identity Theory and Consumer Culture Theory (CCT).

The result we got is founded in positive attitudes towards Oatly. They are connected with attributes as modern and youthful. Appreciated with Oatly are their values, design and business model. The attitudes are thought based on feeling rather than actual knowledge. Which makes it possible to tell that the important thing for the people we interviewed is how the brand is associated not the actual facts about it.  Oatly is seen as healthy because it is vegan, seen as ethical because they grow their oats in Sweden.

To tell if the people we interviewed use Oatly in building their identity was found out to be a rather complicated question. What we learned was that Oatly can be used in building an identity but as a part of other ethical consumption.