Thai Beverage (ThaiBev)

My role is Insight/Research Manager, mainly focusing on alcoholic beverages.

Right now we are interested in the shopper and their purchasing decisions. I work through all kinds of research for the company, mainly sales, consumer and market data but now we are moving to looking at the trade channels and the shoppers as well.

The parent company is about the alcohol category – beer and spirits, but we have some acquisitions in non-alcohol categories such as Oishi, Sermsuk, and we also have F&N dairy products, so we are in almost all the beverage categories.

Our objective is always to increase sales!

Right now Mintel is offering a presentation on trends in Southeast Asia. This has been very useful to me because I can share it not just within my company but with other companies that we work with so we are all pushing in the same direction.

The frequent updates on our category and the coverage of Asian markets are very important for us also.

I think the category insights are quite complete. I rely a lot on GNPD report because you can view all the trends in a specific category with examples of products in other countries. That is very good for us because it very often gives us an idea of what could be applied to our own brands.

We get category insights on a monthly basis in alcohol and non-alcohol categories. The main thing is to get updates on products, more on the non-alcohol side. We have been subscribing for around three years.

We don’t contract creative/media and advertising agencies to the same extent as other FMCGs because the advertising of alcohol is highly regulated in Thailand, so we focus more on sales channels, events marketing, sponsorship and communities. We have to find a way to make sure the brand keeps in the top of consumers’ minds.

I am trying to find updated insights on consumer and category trends on the macro level and Mintel has the periodic presentation and insights on the consumer to keep us up to date.