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.

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.

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.

"It’s pretty surreal having NotMilk's counterpart lawyers creating the fundamentals of NotMilk’s creative campaign". -Matías Muchnick, NotCo CEO.

With that premise, and the NotCo motto "Why not?", we asked ourselves: why not copy paste the exact quotes from the documents of the lawyers who sued us. Maybe that way they would stop bullying us around.

So, what can they sue us for right now, if our words are actually their own? By giving them exactly what they wanted us to do, we actually picked on them and won chilean PR attention and people's positive sentiment around this case.

• 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.