Central Department Store's The Great Chinese New Year 2025 campaign ran across Thailand from 7 January to 6 February 2025, blending cultural festivity with
Central Department Store Turns Chinese New Year 2025 Into a Retail Prosperity Moment
Central Department Store's "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" is a Thai retail film campaign that ran from 7 January to 6 February 2025, positioning the brand as a gateway to happiness and prosperity during the Lunar New Year through exclusive product collections, layered loyalty rewards, credit-card rebates, and Central App promotions across all Central branches in Thailand.
The campaign carries the theme "Embracing Happiness and Welcoming Prosperity," a formulation confirmed by Central's own communications as reported by Springnews Co Th. Rather than anchoring the creative solely in traditional festive imagery, the campaign constructs a value ecosystem: shoppers in Thailand encounter Chinese New Year collections exclusive to the season, cash coupons redeemable in-store, cashback credits through participating credit cards, incremental discount coupons via the Central App, and gifts unlocked upon reaching qualifying spend thresholds. The 1 loyalty programme threads these incentives together, giving both existing members and new customers a structured reason to consolidate their Chinese New Year spending at Central.
The campaign was classified as a Film medium asset on Ads of the World, which listed it as published in January 2025 without critical analysis, per adsoftheworld.com. The single media asset generated 284,597 views and 26 likes on the platform, according to archive records. In Thailand, where Chinese New Year is observed as both a cultural and commercial occasion concentrated in Bangkok's Chinatown district and among Thai-Chinese communities nationwide, the timing places Central at the intersection of tradition and transactional retail. The campaign sits within a broader lineage of Central's seasonal marketing, which according to centralretail.com has historically combined cultural celebration with promotional architecture, including the brand's 75th-anniversary "ALL AT CENTRAL" campaign in 2022. The Clapboard Score for "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" is 57 out of 100.
Central Department Store operates inside a fiercely competitive Thai retail landscape shaped by constrained economic conditions and shifting consumer behaviour. Thailand's GDP growth was approximately 2% in 2025, according to Euromonitor International, compressing discretionary retail demand across the market. Against that backdrop, Thailand's total retail market reached approximately THB 4.62 trillion in 2025, growing 3% year over year, also per Euromonitor International, a figure that signals resilience even under macroeconomic pressure.
The strategic logic of concentrating promotional firepower on Chinese New Year is direct. In Thailand, the festival represents one of the highest-intent shopping windows of the first quarter, drawing consumers who are culturally primed to associate expenditure with auspicious beginnings. Rvisra Chirathivat, Chief Marketing Officer of Central and Robinson Department Store at Central Retail, articulated the strategic frame explicitly, stating as reported by springnews.co.th: "This year, our campaign, 'The Great Chinese New Year 2025,' revolves around the theme of Embracing Happiness and Welcoming Prosperity." That thematic alignment between cultural meaning and commercial incentive is not incidental — it is the strategic core. According to workpointtoday.com, Central and Central Pattana committed 500 million baht to the campaign, signalling the scale of investment behind the promotional push.
Central competes directly with The Mall Group and Robinson Department Store — the latter also within the Central Retail family — while facing category pressure from omnichannel players including Lazada and Shopee, both of which run aggressive Chinese Lunar New Year promotional campaigns across Thailand. As reported by nationthailand.com, inbound-tourism recovery in Thailand was slower than expected in 2025, placing greater weight on domestic consumer traffic to sustain retail sales. Central's response is a layered incentive architecture designed to maximise basket size and visit frequency among Thai shoppers already in-market rather than depending on tourist footfall, reinforcing the domestic-first nature of this campaign's construction.
Central Department Store built "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" around a single film asset anchored in the dual promise of happiness and prosperity. The creative territory is familiar within Chinese Lunar New Year advertising — warmth, abundance, familial connection — but Central's execution distinguishes itself through the integration of commercial mechanics directly into the narrative frame rather than treating promotions as a separate layer appended after an emotional story.
The campaign's Thai-language description, as published on Central's own channels and documented by adsoftheworld.com, structures the viewer's attention around sequential discovery: first the cultural moment, then the exclusive Chinese New Year collection, then the stacked reward opportunities available through The1 programme, participating credit cards, in-store coupons, and the Central App. This sequencing mirrors the consumer decision journey, moving from aspiration to action within a single creative framework. The film targets Thai-Chinese communities and broader Thai consumers who observe the festival across Central's branch network in Thailand, with distribution anchored on digital platforms and in-store environments.
The campaign theme "Embrace happiness, receive prosperity" was confirmed by springnews.co.th as a direct articulation of Central's creative positioning. According to Brandbuffet In Th, the campaign connected the emotional register of festive celebration with tangible financial benefit — a creative tension that, when resolved successfully, elevates retail promotion into something closer to cultural participation. The agency responsible for production has not been publicly disclosed. Production credits for "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" are not publicly documented. What the available record confirms, per Tourist Centralgroup, is that the campaign ran simultaneously across Central's physical department stores throughout Thailand and through the Central App, requiring creative assets calibrated for both in-store and digital environments.
Central Department Store projected 10% sales growth and a 20% increase in customer traffic during the Chinese New Year period, according to Corporate Tops Co Th. These figures represent stated targets rather than independently verified post-campaign results, and no third-party audit of final performance against those projections is publicly available. No verified awards were found for "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" across Cannes Lions, Effies, The One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards.
The archive record on Ads of the World shows 284,597 views, 26 likes, and 2 comments as documented by adsoftheworld.com, figures that reflect platform engagement rather than commercial outcomes. The low like-to-view ratio points to passive consumption rather than active audience participation — a pattern consistent with promotional retail content that drives in-store intent rather than online conversation. No reviews of the campaign were found in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious, per available records.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness is most visible in its incentive architecture. By stacking The1 loyalty benefits, credit-card rebates, cash coupons, Central App discounts, and threshold gifts into a single promotional window, Central creates compounding reasons to choose its stores over competitors during the Chinese New Year period in Thailand. According to workpointtoday.com, the 500-million-baht commitment from Central and Central Pattana signals an institutional bet on the festival season as a traffic and revenue driver — a scale of investment that implies significant internal confidence in the mechanics of the campaign, regardless of the modest social media engagement the film generated. The campaign's Clapboard Score of 57 out of 100 reflects competent execution of a well-established retail-festival formula, with room to develop more distinctive creative differentiation in future iterations.
Central Department Store's "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" is a Thai retail film campaign that ran from 7 January to 6 February 2025. It was built around the theme "Embracing Happiness and Welcoming Prosperity" and offered shoppers in Thailand exclusive collections, loyalty rewards, credit-card rebates, cash coupons, and Central App discounts across all branches.
Central and Central Pattana committed 500 million baht to the Chinese New Year 2025 campaign, according to workpointtoday.com. This investment covered promotions, exclusive product collections, loyalty incentives, and in-store activations across Central's full branch network in Thailand throughout the January 2025 festive period.
Central Department Store projected 10% sales growth and a 20% increase in customer traffic during the Chinese New Year 2025 period, according to corporate.tops.co.th. These were stated targets at the campaign's launch. No independently verified post-campaign figures confirming final performance against those projections are publicly available.
Rvisra Chirathivat, Chief Marketing Officer of Central and Robinson Department Store at Central Retail, led the strategic direction of the campaign. As reported by springnews.co.th, she confirmed the campaign theme as "Embracing Happiness and Welcoming Prosperity" and positioned the initiative as central to Central's first-quarter retail strategy in Thailand.
Shoppers in Thailand received layered benefits including The1 loyalty programme rewards, cashback credits through participating credit cards, in-store cash coupons, additional discount coupons through the Central App, and gifts with qualifying purchases. The promotion ran across all Central Department Store branches and the Central App from 7 January to 6 February 2025.
Central Department Store's "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" campaign received a Clapboard Score of 57 out of 100. The score reflects competent execution of an established retail-festival promotional format, with the campaign earning no verified industry awards and generating modest social engagement relative to its 284,597 archive views, per adsoftheworld.com records.
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