• Situation:

The apprenticeship system as practiced in many parts of Nigeria started as a cultural practice and transformed into an empowerment, business development, and entrepreneurship scheme. Over time, apprentices became seen as less privileged and uneducated people, the practice began to decline and coincidentally unemployment was on the rise. As Nigeria's foremost beer brand, Hero Lager sees the Hero that is within each man. By examining the challenge of unemployment and the massive potential of the apprenticeship system, we saw an opportunity to use something deeply cultural to tackle unemployment.

• Brief:

Cement Hero Lager’s position as the only beer brand that recognizes the people’s culture of hard work, resilience, and entrepreneurship.

• Objectives:

- Establish Hero Lager as a custodian of culture.

- Personify the brand and play a meaningful role in the community.

- Halt brand equity decline and grow brand power, market share, and sales volume.

The Igbo Apprenticeship System is the longest-surviving communal legacy of Hero Lager's consumers. Over time the system was denigrated and labelled as one for poor uneducated people. However, Nigerians have a huge regard for certificates especially those from universities while apprentices after their apprenticeship training know a lot about how to run diverse trades, mentor, and train others but have no certificates to show for all the practical knowledge they learn in trade.

This idea was to formalize the Apprenticeship system by understudying it to unravel its learnings and codify the experience into a first-of-its-kind curriculum that universities can accredit, augment, and ultimately certify. That way upon completion of the training, an apprentice would receive a university certificate and no one would underrate them as many more would enlist to become apprentices.

• Target audience

Male, aged 25 – 45, SEC: CD, business-minded individual, employed and unemployed.

• Approach

We set up a team of university professors, trade masters, and apprentices, to thoroughly examine the Igbo Apprenticeship System and enumerate all the apprentices learned in their years of training.

These learnings were curated into a business curriculum and course presented to the government and university faculties for review. The Universities were also to supplement the practical knowledge acquired by the apprentices with the corresponding theoretical framework.

Upon approval by the government and successful university accreditation, apprentices were awarded certificates in a graduation ceremony organized by the university. No apprentice is unemployed; better still, apprentices create jobs. By making the apprenticeship system aspirational, more people would enlist to become apprentices. With more apprentices and entrepreneurs, more jobs would be created, thereby tackling unemployment.

• Implementation:

The campaign started with awareness on Radio with radio Hypes across selected key markets (Anambra, Abia, Enugu, Port Harcourt, Akwa Ibom) and also supported with guest appearances by popular brand ambassadors, like Rude Boy of P-Square to prepare the minds of the audience for the initiative to be launched.

Roadshows were organized to draw people’s attention to the main event (market activation)

Top news platforms in Nigeria (Channels TV, Arise TV, and all local NTA channels across 7 markets) covered each roadshow, market activation, and the launch, for their markets and ran the coverage within the news.

University training commenced in November 2023 with more than 500 apprentices simultaneously trained across 5 universities for 3 months earning them University certificates they could brag about.

• Timeline: 2023 - 2024

• Placement: TV, Radio, OOH, Market activations

• Scale: National

• Brand Power grew by +1.1pts; the brand attained the highest brand power growth in a quarter and the highest brand power in the beer category.

• Market Share Growth: +0.7pts

• Volume Growth: +11%

• Earned Media: $1.5M, brand trended #1 on Nigeria's Twitter space

• Digital Impressions: 91,153,680

• Consumer Votes/Poll: 1.5M

• Engagement rate: 10%

• 20K+ apprentices signed up for the training

• The project has the potential to create 450k jobs