Krungthai Bank, as ‘The Bank of Thai people, for Thai People’, determined to be the big movement for ‘Thailand Financial Literacy’ by creating a campaign that provides education, understanding, and financial practices to stimulate Thais to have better financial discipline.

We looked into Thai’s insight about bad spending habits. There is an idiom for it, called ‘what’s the point to buy this seal?’ It means compulsory buying habit without any reasons. It is a familiar term Thais use to say but hard to behave. So they ended up buying many seals; unnecessary things they bought without reasons which led to a big pile of unused stuff in every household.

We elaborate this insight in communication campaign called ‘Young Man & The Seal’, showing bad shopping habit without reason. The campaign utilizes ‘the seal’ as a symbol to provoke audiences’ thought that they might also buy irresponsibly.

Moreover, we spin social conversation about the seal to raise awareness and remind them to stop and think before buying unnecessary stuff.

Firstly, we started with the understanding on Thais perception and found out that most of Thai people perceive ‘Financial Literacy’ as a well-understood ‘Financial Knowledge’ e.g. money-saving, investment, financial planning, debt management, etc. However, they still have financial problems as reflected in online conversations and various statistics. From this point, we figured out that the biggest problem is not a lack of education, but a lack of motivation to take action instead.

So, we explored the root cause of bad financial habits which is the financial hedonism; the misbelief that ‘spending money is happiness and self-rewarding’ makes them spend money irresponsibly on unnecessary things without thinking thoroughly.

In order to create Financial Literacy among Thais, our biggest task is to tackle down this misbelief and provoke thought to spend responsibly to build a strong foundation of every good financial life.

Some of Thai people on social media use the word “seal” as a symbol to represent unnecessary things that people buying without thinking.

We created an online film which is about “Mansuang” a man who bought the seal as a pet. The only reason that he made the decision to buy the seal is that he heard his friend said that “it’s a MUST HAVE item”. Living with the seal is uneasy and has high cost more than he can effort but at the end of the day, people will realize that not only Mansuang but everyone has the seal in their different form. The seal has become something that helps people to be more aware when it comes to their spending and shopping habits.

‘Young Man & The Seal’ got 26 Million impressions, more than 835 thousand engagement and 1st rank on twitter trend in Thailand. And the most important thing is that this campaign got 100% positive conversation. The success is making people aware of themselves, tagging friends to watch, and talking about their bad financial habits which they intend to change. All these quality comments reflect how well the target understands our campaign and also the key message that we want to communicate about being fully conscious before buying.