Following Thailand's reopening to international tourists, leading retailers are rushing to join forces with their partners to launch marketing campaigns to revive shopping sentiment and stimulate shopping sprees among both Thai and foreign consumers.
SET-listed retail giant Central Pattana Plc (CPN) has teamed up with Central Retail and more than 40 leading partners nationwide with a budget of 800 million baht to launch "The Greatest Grand Sale 2022'', a mid-year sales campaign during June 10-July 31 this year, through 35 branches of its shopping centres, department stores and shops nationwide.
More than 10,000 brands are scheduled to offer customer discounts of up to 80%, with cashback credit of up to 30%, lucky draws and luxury hotel packages. Brands that will join this campaign include Central department store, Robinson Lifestyle, Tops market together with Central Restaurants Group (CRG) and Centara Hotels & Resorts.
"This campaign also aims to help ease the cost of living for people due to high fuel costs, drive economic growth and increase our customer traffic by more than 30% nationwide,'' said Nattakit Tangpoonsinthana, CPN executive vice-president of marketing.
Pattaphong Iamsuro, chief commercial officer of Big C Supercenter Plc, said that Big C has seen the gradual resumption of visits of foreign tourists from Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan at 20 Big C stores located at popular tourist destinations such as Pattaya, Phuket and Ratchadamri in Bangkok since this year's Songkran festival.
"Foreign customer traffic at Big C stores in tourist destinations has seen a leap in growth after we received more shoppers from India and the Middle East, resulting in our customer traffic at tourist destination branches returning to 50% of the pre-crisis level in 2019,'' he said.
Mr Pattaphong said Big C had already been making its own preparations to welcome back foreign shoppers over a period of several months, referring specifically to the layout of the tourist zone at the company's Ratchadamri branch, which is scheduled to be ready next week.
Moreover, the product mix has been adjusted to fit the needs of shoppers from various countries. It has also joined hands with suppliers to produce exclusive items for tourists at all Big C stores.
"If Chinese tourists are allowed to travel to Thailand in the fourth quarter of this year, tourist customer traffic at our stores would be back to the level seen in 2019,'' he said.
Meanwhile, Suthisarn Chirathivat, chief executive of CRC Thai Watsadu, said the firm recently launched two new "go! WOW'' standalone stores -- one in Nakhon Ratchasima's Sikhiu district and the other in Samut Prakan's Muang district.
