Brief Explanation

The brand is currently under threat from international competitors entering the market, so the brief was to create a promotion to help strengthen this relationship between SP Lager and the country's national sport, Rugby League.

The Brief

SP Lager is Papua New Guinea’s biggest brewery and the country’s favourite beer. The company’s brand values revolve around ‘mate-ship’ – getting together with friends and enjoying a few beers. This is why SP Lager is the main sponsor of PNG’s favourite sport, Rugby League. It’s like a religion in PNG, fans never miss a game. They love nothing more than getting together to have a few SP's and watch the game on TV.

How the final design was conceived

Our opportunity presented itself in a problem many customers face. PNG is a mountainous country with poor communications infrastructure. This results in notoriously bad TV reception for people living on the outskirts of town (a majority of the population). Most customers also come from low socio-economic backgrounds and store-bought TV antennas are outside their budget. So we created The SP Lager Cantenna. A limited-edition beer carton that converts empty beer cans into a working, high quality TV antenna. Beer cans actually make perfect TV antennas. They’re the optimal shape and size and are made from high-quality food-grade aluminium - an excellent signal conductor. Upon testing, the SP Cantenna actually worked better than many store bought TV antennas. A gift with purchase, each specially marked SP Cantenna carton included an easy-to-assemble kit with everything customers needed to make their own Cantenna. The carton itself was used as the base and simple instructions and die-cuts to were featured on the outside to help customers assemble their Cantenna.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

The SP Cantenna kits were a hit with PNG’s rugby loving public, selling out within the first 2 weeks of the promotion. This helped upsell customers to a 24-pack (average price 96 Kina or US$35.66), up from the 6-pack price of 27 Kina (US$10.03). This represents an average increase of US$25.63 per transaction. The Cantenna promotion also helped cement SP Lager’s position as PNG’s national beer, achieving a score of 78% against their brand KPI of being ‘A brand that understands PNG people.’ Source: Global Commerce University Study. Not only did the promotion help position drinking SP Lager as essential to watching the 2015 Rugby League TV, we made our packaging become a permanent branded part of customer’s homes. In addition, it helped slow the market penetration of international competitors.