In Kenya, people’s everyday conversations have been dominated by pessimism, tribal division and low self-belief in the wake of a trying couple of years. As Kenya’s national brew, we needed to find a way to get Kenyan’s believing in each other again and toasting to each others successes with a Tusker. In a country with very low smartphone penetration, Team Kenya uses two existing mobile platforms working in unison to create a direct link with our consumer. USSD, a platform used by most Africans to recharge airtime from any standard feature phone was combined with Mpesa, the Kenyan mobile money-sharing platform. Together they gave us a way to create a community where we could talk about Kenyan national success and reward those that participated with a free beer.

USSD is a feature phone platform widely used across Africa to recharge airtime. From a multiple choice style menu system, users simply dial into a USSD number and follow simple prompts to accomplish what they need to do. We combined this with Mpesa, the Kenyan invented money-sharing platform where users SIM cards have essentially become their bank accounts, from which they can load and spend money at hundreds of thousands of stores across Kenya. When you combine these platforms what you have is a way to communicate to a wide audience where they can respond in real time and you can reward them instantly with cash, all through their humble feature phone.

Team Kenya now has over 2 million active members who we can target at specific times and by region to stimulate consumption and inform about promotions. Since the launch of Team Kenya, Tusker Lager had enjoyed their highest sales figures in 5 years.