Marketing in Thailand as a Foreigner: Volume #1 The Legend Thai Ads

Sometimes, It’s Okay to Wear Socks and Sandals.

Matching socks and sandals is a universal fashion faux pas, but it is more severe in Thailand. They keep you warm and cold-free during winter, but we never merge them with sandals or flip-flops because it is confusing when you live in a country where the equator is only 15 degrees below. You are overly afraid to be unrelatable and thus conform to the locals. It is only natural to do so because we are all humans, but please do not apply this to marketing. Marketing localisation sounds nice if you do it precisely with the right amount, but can you compete with the Thais who know better, or will you be willing to look like any other Farangs who use an identical localisation strategy? This series of articles will make you embrace your foreign oddity or stick to what you might know best rather than only blindly applying what the natives have done successfully.

Volume#1: The Legend Thai Ads

The New Journey

YAY! Congratulations on being a new Thailand marketing manager or whichever position you need to flip a marketing situation for your brand in our country. The first that might come to mind to know more about our marketing landscape is through our infamous ads by visiting ‘Thai #Funny Commercials #1’ or ‘Tear-Jerker Commercials Create Internet Challenge’ on YouTube. You probably think, “I need to create one of these legacies for my brand during my marketing reign.” You are not wrong. We, Thai people, love these funny or tear-jerking ads. These kinds were and still are what we expect from brands, but the digital world has revolutionised its impact forever. If the same ads 10 years ago had been launched online today, it would not have had the same effect.

The Digitally Amplified Exposure Effect

The majority of Thai ads today are still the equivalence of the past in the sense of creativity and content, but these two reasons are why ads impact has been much more diminished in the present days:

1. We have had comparisons and have been repeatedly exposed to the same creative calibre for a long time. This has worn us out to the place where all creatives seem generic.
2. Overexposure alone had already been such a pain, but it has been intensified through the power of communication. Back then, you only saw these ads from TVs, not just through platforms with great power of shareability, with the audience having omnipresent access to unique ads not only from Thailand but the world.

These two factors have allegedly numbed our receptive minds and created indifference towards ads. Suppose you still stick to what you know about our local advertising scene years ago to understand marketing idiosyncrasies in Thailand. In that case, the outcome will either be less or equal to what others are serving.

Trust Your Foreign Creative Juice!

The solution is simple: conceiving novel marketing schticks the Thais have never experienced, but our Thai agencies and advertisers have been doing it every day. But lucky you! The difference between you and local creative agencies is you have foreign nuances from your nonnative upbringing and experience. Although Thai advertisers look at international case studies and references, the creative juice is not easy to be stemmed artificially, not just by looking through Ads of the World and TikTok. Voila! You have the edge now, and not everyone can top you easily. Worry not about being unrelatable to the Thai audience. The pain from exposure also creates a new sense of how we are susceptible to different kinds of creativity from different cultural contexts.

Creative desensitisation is a pain for all marketers and advertisers, forcing us to be impossibly creative daily because someone (a lot, actually) is getting bored. This is a tip from someone who has seen Thai advertisers trapped in their successful patterns from our so-called legendary ads in the past. Do not let the fear of being unrelatable refrain you from projecting your original foreign thoughts to Thai audiences. They might be the new blueprints to reviving the timelessness our Thai ads used to be known for in the glory days.

Yes, you will probably look bizarre.

Yes, you are going to be notoriously remembered for your oddity.

But one thing is, your ads will be unforgettable in our little country, which is the foundation of marketing. Remember, Justin Bieber once pulled socks and sandals off!

Writer: Don Gorrith, Senior Strategic Planner at Yell Advertising Bangkok