A Milk Monologue
The brief history of how marketers have been leveraging social movements for your money. It’s why choosing a milk alternative for your coffee feels the same as taking a stand for your identity.
My mini milk monologue is one example of a much broader epidemic in which marketers convince us the things we buy define who we are. Marketers create, encourage, or capture social movements to direct our dollars and identity.
We’re aware of it, sometimes. But other times, we forget the manipulation is as pervasive and subtle as what you add to your morning coffee.
Factually, people have been drinking less cow-udder-milk over time: Since 1975, the average American has decreased yearly cow-udder-milk consumption by ~40%.
Why did we stop drinking cow-udder-milk?
Milk first lost momentum due to two social movements; a combination of animal activists leveraging YouTube to describe the environmental impact of cow-udder-milk as well as the ‘Clean Eating’ movement taking over the health conversation.
Soy sensed the opportunity, and WhiteWave started positioning soy as an alternative to big bad milk by simply moving their product to the refrigerated aisle (that’s all it took!). Soy was the first mainstream milk alternative, but in retrospect, it was just the beginning.
Soy lost momentum because — you guessed it — a social movement. People became afraid of “feminizing” men when they found soya contains estrogen-like compounds that were thought to mimic the hormone’s effects in humans. The science was suspect, the social movement was real.
Soy’s loss was almond’s gain, opening the window for a new alternative to ride in on its own righteous social movement. The California Almond Industry funded & publicized research on the benefits of almonds leveraging the same health movement that drove milk out.
Almond went out of style because the environmental folks shamed the health folks. It takes 4.5 liters of water to grow a single almond making it bad for the environment. People also discovered almond milk contains 2% almonds; it’s 90%+ water-based. Oops.
Oat grew from almond’s demise with marketing exploiting a more recent social movement: independent coffee shops. Oatly, the main oat milk brand, marketed a “barista edition” because (unlike other alternatives) it foams. Unlike soy & almond, Oatly ignored supermarkets and targeted the growing trend of independent coffee shops.
Takeaway: The alternative milk market is solely driven by leveraging social movements: a shared collective anxiety is created (environmental or health concerns), the last craze is villainized on those terms (which often are the very terms it replaced its predecessor with), then the next product is ushered in by “empowering” customers to buy the new “value.”
I say solely driven because 90% of plant milk buyers still purchase other dairy products like cheese and ice cream; only 10% of people are looking for dairy alternatives!
The rest of us, myself often included, are being led around like cattle.
huge s/o Oliver Franklin-Wallis’ informative article: White Gold
