Marketing in Thailand as a Foreigner: Volume #2.1 Ad Campaign Crossroad: Global Materials vs. The New Investment

Sometimes, It’s Okay to Wear Socks and Sandals

Foreign marketers sometimes need to be bold enough to wear socks and sandals in a tropical country like Thailand to stand out. If you wonder why: READ HERE. I have no space for rewriting all this; otherwise, you would think this article is too long, but it is already long enough that I have to separate this volume into 2 parts.

Volume#2.1: Ad Campaign Crossroad: Global Materials vs. The New Investment PART 1

The first instinct of any foreign marketer to promote a product is to represent a brand or product with the locals’ undiscovered insights. Usually, you will be tested with crossroads between using the unrelatable global materials with some adjustment (which in this case is a translation) or investing in a new ad campaign. It is a no-brainer that the majority would go for the former. Apart from the sake of approachability, It is more exhilarating as it gives you a sense of purpose to roll up your sleeves and start from scratch to enduring pensive strategy brainstorming and endless production period. This is super logical and sound, but is it realistically necessary?

That is why I would like to take another angle to look at it. Materials circulated from the headquarters or international branches could be tedious but super cost-effective. Advertising is just a fragment of contribution to marketing success. The followings are personal criteria for me to consider before rushing all the marketing budget into vain by starting from scratch when you already have something effective to work on.

The 1st and the most cliché criterion: Your Marketing Objectives

Most of the time, the objective to decide these two approaches is to create a value towards your brand or products through ads. Thus, the marketing instinct inside me ‘always’ urges me to find another better local insight to compete with the message the global team had already converted into tangible brand material. Just using the heavily-repeated global ad already makes me feel weak because I believe effectiveness comes from approachability through localisation because people from different nations possess various cultural pain points.

But I always remind myself that pain points are universal, sometimes (please emphasise this adverb of frequency). Let’s take Apple as an example. Apple’s (almost) latest campaign in Thailand is about their privacy security for consumers (which is a pain for online advertisers like us because of their data regulation). Digging for a new pain point or so-called insights might not be necessary when the objective is super straightforward and its product feature is designed to do so clearly. Data privacy is universal, and the feature from product feature has only one job to communicate. What is the point of adding whimsical investment because our instinct challenges me to be better than the global?

But please don’t be mistaken. Sometimes (emphasise again!), finding a hidden pain point is essential, and I so have I selected this extravagant solution. The example is my project from Soffell, a mosquito repellant in the form of lotion and spray. Soffell is an Indonesian brand. In the past, Soffell Thailand had used materials from the global team, which was doing sufficiently fine. However, our team was challenged with a task to create a difference because Soffell has reached its peak in using Indonesian materials. My team has found out that Thai people’s fear level of mosquitos depends on their region. Mosquito savageness varies from place to place. This is the kind of cultural pain point I talked about. The global team would not have never discovered this. Hence, localisation is necessary because the circulated material from the global is meant to highlight generic usage of the product, not to be specific about undiscovered pain points!

There is a lot more to discuss!

There are two more criteria I would like to elaborate my point of view, but I think it is going to be too long for our focus that has deteriorated by the rise of TikTok. So my next volume will still be the same topic with more reasons to let you breathe and think before making such a lavish decision. I need to end this volume with my signature epilogue for my article concept of ‘Sometimes, it’s okay to Wear Socks and Sandals,’ but the rest of this volume has not been yet published. So, I cannot make sense out of this forever-repeated sentences. But let me do it anyway:

If you are bold enough to long for the second part of my article, 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! And I promise I’ll revisit this article to put the link to my second part of this volume once it has been published.

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