This is a story that represents the sign of times. The Old Testament versus the new order of things. Old recording labels versus Spotify. Conservative vs progressive. The big dairy industry in Chile who wanted to keep consumers captive vs NotCo who disrupted the market with a dairy alternative product such as NotMilk. This story is about winning the match without writing a single ad. Just using pure aikido strategy, repurposing what the Dairy industry used against us as our most resourceful defense.

NotMilk is a plant-based alternative to milk created by the chilean food-tech NotCo (The Not Company).

Since NotMilk was launched in the market, the powerful dairy industry declared war filing a strong lawsuit that presented NotMilk as a company without scruples that was misleading consumers to buy a product that is not milk.

As any other legal battle in the corporate world, this was taking years of back and forth without moving a single inch. That wasn’t good for the brand. We feared that this was never going to end, so at one point, we decided to implement a new strategy, one that would disarm their lawyers. A creative strategy with no chance for comeback.

Our objective was to put in evidence the surrealistic pretension of the dairy industry, to shut us down for promoting a different alternative to their product making clear once for all that our intention was never to mislead the market: We’ve been always sure of our identity and proposition. We don’t offer milk. Our name is “NotMilk” for God’s sake!

By doing this in a creative and resourceful way, we would gain notoriety and bolster consumer’s acceptance, not just as a product, but as their champion.

Nothing more irresistible than the story of an underdog shaking the status quo.

NotMilk represented that. The brand that was offering options, setting consumers free. In contrast to the dairy industry that had been telling them for years the only option was milk. Hey, we never said that consuming milk was wrong. We just said that consuming NotMilk was great.

And we were sued for that. But also people’s opportunity to have choices was being sued.

If the only thing we did was to be true to our product and ethos (plant based food tech company) and both, NotMilk and the powerful Dairy Industry agreed on something, that we are NotMilk and they were pretty eloquent at demonstrating that all across the hundreds of pages in their lawsuit . . . so we said: “Why don’t we use their legal arguments as our best defense?”

And that’s exactly what we did. We let them write our campaign.

We dived into 2 years of legal documents to find that many of the things those big dairy industry's lawyers wrote about NotMilk, actually defined NotMilk in a perfect way.

We simply copy-pasted excerpts from their lawsuit and turn them into our ads. The consumers received our campaign (should we say their campaign?) with humor having a laugh at the expense of the dairy industry, together with us.

• We boosted the trial conversion of the product to an historic 93%.

• The campaign created a halo effect on the line extensions in NotMilk’s portfolio, with an overall increase in the market share of 5 points during the first Q of 2023.

• A 92% positive sentiment in RRSS.

• Over US$ 350K in local press CLP in local press (helped us to add pressure to the competitor’s legal team to desist pursuing with their case).

• +20 minutes of interviews in news media with a reach of over 280,000.

• Content published in more than 30 publications in national digital media with a reach of 12,107,000.

• 14 mentions in national media profiles in social media with a reach of 13,033,000.

Instead of fighting big dairy industry lawyers by trying to find new ways to do so or changing our product name or communication, we did what they would never imagine: we used their same arguments, literally copy-pasted them, to build our new campaign.

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