As household budgets tighten across Ethiopia, Heineken’s Harar brand is betting that protecting social rituals matters more than protecting price points.
In Ethiopia right now, buying a beer with friends has become a small calculation. Disposable income is under pressure, and the social occasions that once felt automatic, a round after work, a drink at the local, now carry a cost people weigh before they commit. Kassahun Feleke, Heineken Ethiopia’s Marketing Director, put it plainly in a public post this week: connection was losing to cost.
Drawn from K. Feleke, LinkedIn, May 2026
Harar Beer’s answer is a promotional campaign that lets consumers pay for beer using laughter. The mechanic runs through an app called SAQPay, which captures a user’s laugh, assigns it a monetary equivalent, and converts it into redeemable value at point of sale. The campaign, called Pay With Laughter, was developed by Heineken Ethiopia’s marketing team with agency partners Red Communications and Cactus Communications.
The activation is openly positioned as a response to economic pressure rather than a standard promotional cycle. When household budgets tighten, alcohol is typically an early discretionary cut. Brands that respond by defending emotional relevance rather than discounting on margin are making a deliberate calculation: that loyalty costs less to retain than to rebuild once conditions ease. Harar’s campaign sits squarely in that logic.
“In tough times, brands shouldn’t ask for more. They should give people a reason to connect more.”
Kassahun Feleke, Marketing Director, Heineken Ethiopia — LinkedIn, May 2026
The campaign also reflects a broader pattern in African FMCG markets, where brands facing currency depreciation and eroding consumer purchasing power have increasingly turned to experiential and community-anchored activations rather than price reductions that compress already-thin margins. Drinkabl.media’s recent coverage of Orijin’s AMVCA activation traced the same strategic logic at work in Nigeria: use culture to hold the consumer relationship when price can no longer do it. Laughter as currency is an unusual mechanic, but the underlying brief is not.
Whether SAQPay has utility beyond the campaign window is unconfirmed. The activation signals that Heineken Ethiopia is treating the country’s macroeconomic strain as a brand problem to be managed rather than a volume problem to be absorbed. The next test is whether that holds at the shelf, where consumer decisions are made without an app or a campaign to soften the trade-off.
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