SET-listed retail and property developer, Central Pattana Plc (CPN), has teamed up with Line Friends to launch a joint marketing campaign, with combined spending of 500 million baht to welcome the annual peak tourist season.
Nattakit Tangpoonsinthana, CPN's executive vice-president of marketing, said the "Embracing Happiness 2023" campaign, running from Nov 8 this year until Jan 6, 2023, aims to help spur the economy in the fourth quarter of this year and welcome the return of tourists from around the world.
The campaign focuses on three strategies to provide a happy experience at 37 Central shopping complexes nationwide by bringing widely-loved global characters for a close-up experience in an area covering 7,000 square metres, emphasising Thailand as a global festival landmark.
The campaign is expected to generate over 30% additional customer traffic nationwide.
"It is the first time that Line Friends has launched a full-scale campaign in Thailand, where 53 million of the [country's] population has associated with it. As these global characters are loved and known by millennials and Gen Z, this is believed to help increase high engagement to our shoppers,'' Mr Nattakit said.
He expects the campaign to draw weekly travellers from Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea to Thailand throughout the festival.
Mr Nattakit said customer traffic at Central shopping centres nationwide has now almost returned to 100%, in line with the latest Agoda survey which revealed that Bangkok is the world's most popular tourist destination that people wish to visit.
Global trends also show that people are now ready to travel again and have started to plan their end-of-year trips, while domestic tourism is likely to increase, with 90% of Thai people planning domestic travel for their holidays.
"Thailand's retail sector is expected to recover in the fourth quarter of this year and attract 10 million foreign tourists or more," Mr Nattakit said, adding that after several restrictions for Covid-19 had been eased, and the tourism situation got better, shopping sentiment has improved month by month.
However, the company still needs the government's stimulus packages to boost spending on shopping during the festive season.
"We expect the retail situation will be back to normal on par with the pre-crisis level [in 2019] if the flooding situation does not last for a long time. However, if the situation gets worse, we have measures to tackle it because of experience gained in 2011,'' Mr Nattakit said.