Unlike other financial education campaigns which are boring, mundane, and feels irrelevant to Thais. Our campaign was created to provoke thoughts and turn heads, in order to make financial education more approachable and interesting. We utilized the insight of Thai’s bad buying habits, which derived from the phrase, “What’s the point of buying this seal?” Therefore, we used a seal as the main subject that represents impulsive and unnecessary bought products or services. The mysterious and out of place storytelling was used to create an entertainment value and making financial literacy more understandable for the mass Thais.

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.

As we found that there is a lot of financial education campaigns, but none of them has ever taught consumers how to spend with discipline. For this campaign, we do not stop people from spending but rather to suggest people not to spend without thinking. We intend to help people to stop and think before spending.

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.

We, then, 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.

‘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.