Marketing in Bangkok is a unique experience when compared to many other cities and certainly when compared to American cities. First, the Asian culture is completely different from the west. Second, although the overwhelming majority of people in Bangkok are Thai, there are also sizable communities of people who speak Japanese, English and Chinese. This means that trying to reach people through Traditional media can be difficult since there are Thai, English and Japanese newspapers here and radio stations in Thai, English and Chinese. And the mass market TV stations are all in Thai.
Since reaching people through traditional media is difficult many forward-thinking marketers are turning increasingly to the internet. There are many Thai language websites here in Thailand but many Thais also use English-language sites to a certain degree. Therefore, many marketers that are trying to reach local audiences for different products have quite a number of options. YouTube and Google, for example, get large numbers of Thai visitors and there is also a Thai-language versions of Google.
There are also a few Thai-language video sharing sites, although they receive very small amounts of traffic compared to YouTube. So, marketers here are producing content that is in English or Thai and also using tags in both languages to experiment with the effectiveness of tags that are not in English. Since Thais search in both languages this should ultimately prove to be successful.
Marketing companies in Bangkok are also using email marketing as part of their mix although reliable email lists are hard to come by here. However, there are some small lists available that are relatively reliable and there is at least one company that we know of – contactbangkok.com – that sends out weekly newsletters to its 40,000-strong database of businesses and you can pay to put an HTML ad inside it.
And, as connection and download speeds become faster here in Thailand, the use of video is becoming more and more important to marketers looking to use the fastest-growing and most effective method of communicating ideas. As mentioned above, there are very few Thai video-sharing sites but the major video-sharing sites in the world are becoming more popular here and traffic is on the rise.
As in other more developed countries, Thailand is also turning to the internet but the progress here has been somewhat slower. With recent technology and infrastructure improvements here, however, that progress should quicken and propel Thailand into the ranks of its more advanced neighbors.