Marketing Spotlight: We love Ratchaprasong?

We love Ratchaprasong?

If you Google ‘we love ratchaprasong’ you can see over 7,500 results with links to news sites, blogs, video’s, rant’s and so on. Whilst not all are about ‘we love ratchaprasong’ many are, but does that mean the campaign is successful or even appropriate?

Following the street protests and violence of April and May 2010 it was very surprising how quickly posters and other signs began appearing everywhere even when the smell of burning rubber was still hanging in the air and clinging to parts of the BTS system. It was not just the ‘We love Ratchaprasong’ banners, but T-shirts with ‘Together We Can’, hoardings with ‘Come Together’ and countless other variations on the theme. Whilst many were probably very well intentioned a number of commercial enterprises just seemed to be hijacking the sentiment to such an extent it actually looks like cynical marketing. New incidences of this are still appearing on billboards, in stores and television every month. 

‘We love Ratchaprasong’ is unfortunately the most prominent of the campaigns particularly in the Ratchaprasong area which makes it look very much like a ‘Mai Pen Rai’ or ‘Nothing Happened’ campaign especially after the massive Red Shirt Rally of 19th September – the ‘Nothing Happened’ happened again albeit it only for one day.

The campaign kind of reminds us of ‘Green-washing’, a phrase which is being used time and time again to describe company marketing campaign’s that paint a thin veneer of being environmentally friendly over something that is quite clearly not. Unfortunately, as David Ogilvy (of the Ogilvy and Mather, Advertising Agency) once said, ”the customer isn’t a moron, she is your wife.” Consumers are getting more and more cynical about any marketing message that has an element of fabrication, under the carpet sweeping or just downright lies. Anything in your communication message that does not ring true or just feels wrong either makes the consumer ignore you or even worse get angry and tell all of their friends; or even worse tell all of their Facebook friends or Twitter followers – social media amplification of colossal proportions!!

So if ‘We love Ratchaprasong’ is well intentioned and is really about rallying support for retailers in the area and secondly trying to bring people together what could the protagonists have done a little better? Given what happened in Ratchaprasong in April and May and the fact the memory isn’t going to fade very quickly, why not stick to something that both Thai’s and visitors love doing in Bangkok and in particularly in the Ratchaprasong area? How about ‘We love Shopping’? A campaign that is focused around the Ratchaprasong area stating what most people in Bangkok do anyway avoids any hidden or misunderstood messages and still helps drive people to shop, which in turn supports the retailers who are paying for the campaign

We fully recognize that conducting any marketing or publicity for an area that has been damaged physically or by reputation because of disturbances of any kind is never going to be easy, but couldn’t this have been done with a little more finesse? BRT

This article was first published in Business Report Thailand, Issue 1, October 2010.