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Central Department Store Turns Chinese New Year Into a Month-Long Retail Moment
Central Department Store's "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" is a month-long Thai retail campaign published in January 2025, uniting Lunar New Year cultural symbolism with layered promotional mechanics across physical stores and the Central App to drive festive spending and footfall during one of Thailand's highest-gifting periods.
The campaign ran from 7 January to 6 February 2025, spanning every Central Department Store branch in Thailand and the brand's proprietary Central App. Its core proposition, expressed in Thai as "โอบความสุข รับความมั่งคั่ง" — broadly, "embrace happiness, receive wealth" — positions the store as both a cultural destination and a practical gifting hub for Thai consumers observing Chinese New Year 2025. The promotional architecture is deliberately multi-layered: shoppers could access special Lunar New Year product collections, member benefits through The 1 loyalty programme, participating credit-card privileges, cash coupons redeemable in-store, credit-card cashback, additional discount coupons via the Central App, and qualifying-purchase gifts. This stacking of incentives is designed to reward existing loyalty members while simultaneously drawing in new customers motivated by the festive occasion.
In Thailand, Chinese New Year is a commercially significant period, particularly among Thai-Chinese communities whose gifting and ceremonial expenditure concentrate around the weeks bracketing the Lunar New Year date. Central Department Store's decision to open the campaign window on 7 January — well ahead of the 29 January 2025 Lunar New Year date — reflects a strategic intent to capture early-season shopping rather than compete only at peak. The campaign's film medium delivers its cultural narrative as a single hero asset, consistent with the brand's established approach to major festive properties. "The Great Chinese New Year" has operated as an annual campaign platform since at least 2023, according to centralretail.com, giving the 2025 edition the benefit of audience familiarity and accumulated brand association with the occasion.
Central Department Store treats Chinese New Year as a structured commercial platform rather than a one-off promotional event. The strategic rationale is grounded in the cultural weight of Lunar New Year for Thai-Chinese consumers, whose ceremonial and gifting behaviours reliably concentrate spending in a defined window — a pattern that makes early-season activation and loyalty-reward layering more valuable than last-minute discounting alone.
Central Retail, the parent group, reported a portfolio including 85 department stores at the end of the first half of 2025, according to centralretail.com, giving the brand unmatched physical reach across Thailand's retail landscape. That scale means a campaign like "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" can generate national momentum while remaining locally relevant at branch level. According to mitihoon.com, Central Department Store entered the 2025 Lunar New Year period with internal expectations of a 10% sales increase versus 2024 and a 20% uplift in customer traffic — targets that reflect the brand's confidence in the established platform's ability to shift behaviour at scale.
The competitive context in Thailand's department-store sector features rivals including Robinson — itself part of the Central Retail group — and The Mall Group, whose competing Lunar New Year activations have historically focused on cultural programming and dining-led footfall. Central differentiates by anchoring its Chinese New Year 2025 campaign in omnichannel reward mechanics: the combination of The 1 membership benefits, credit-card partner privileges, and Central App-exclusive coupons creates a closed ecosystem that competitors without an equivalent loyalty infrastructure cannot replicate. According to Insideretail Asia, growth across Thailand's retail market is increasingly pursued through omnichannel commerce, customer data utilisation, and retail-media income rather than store-count expansion alone — a trajectory that Central's app-integrated campaign directly addresses. The 2025 campaign's film asset anchors the emotional narrative, while the promotional stack converts that emotion into transactional intent across every channel the brand controls.
Central Department Store's "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" campaign is executed as a single film asset. Production credits for "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" are not publicly documented, and no agency has been disclosed in connection with this campaign. The creative approach draws directly on the symbolic vocabulary of Lunar New Year — prosperity, familial warmth, and the expectation of abundance — and translates those themes into a retail context where happiness and wealth are framed as things Central Department Store can actively deliver, not merely celebrate.
The campaign's Thai-language tagline, "โอบความสุข รับความมั่งคั่ง" (embrace happiness, receive wealth), is doing specific creative work. It adopts the register of a Lunar New Year blessing — the kind of phrase exchanged between family members — and attaches it to a commercial proposition. This linguistic move is consistent with the brand's long-standing creative strategy on the platform. According to centralretail.com, Central Department Store's historic Chinese New Year advertising featured a grandmother character being asked where she wanted to go for Chinese New Year, with the answer being "To Central!" — an approach that embeds the store into the emotional geography of family festivity rather than positioning it as a functional retail stop.
The 2025 execution maintains that tradition of cultural embedding while extending it across physical and digital touchpoints. The single film asset operates as the emotional anchor for a campaign whose promotional mechanics — collections, coupons, cashback, app discounts, gifts — are communicated through supporting in-store and in-app materials. This division of labour between emotional storytelling in film and transactional detail in channel-specific formats reflects a mature campaign architecture, consistent with the "The Great Chinese New Year" platform's operation across 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 editions, as documented by centralretail.com. The visual and tonal continuity across years is itself a creative asset, building the kind of audience anticipation that transforms an annual promotion into a cultural fixture.
No verified post-campaign sales lift, market-share change, or independent brand-tracking data for "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" is publicly available at the time of writing. Pre-campaign, according to mitihoon.com, Central Department Store set internal targets of a 10% year-on-year sales increase and a 20% rise in customer traffic for the Lunar New Year 2025 period. Whether those targets were met has not been confirmed in any public source reviewed for this case study.
Structurally, the campaign's design is well-suited to delivering against both metrics. The early start date of 7 January — three weeks before the 29 January Lunar New Year date — extends the earning window for loyalty-driven shoppers and reduces dependency on peak-day footfall. The layering of The 1 member benefits, credit-card cashback, in-store cash coupons, and Central App discounts creates multiple parallel incentive paths, each targeting a different shopper segment: loyalty members, credit-card holders, and digitally active younger consumers. According to centralretail.com, Central Retail's 2025 planning materials indicated an expected year-end network of 76 Central and Robinson department stores, underlining the group's continued investment in the physical retail estate that the campaign was designed to activate.
The campaign received no independent awards coverage or reviews from trade publications including Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious at the time of publication. The "The Great Chinese New Year" platform's consistent annual operation — confirmed across 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 by centralretail.com — is itself a performance signal: campaigns that do not demonstrably serve commercial objectives are rarely sustained as named annual properties by major retailers. The platform's longevity suggests internal measurement has justified continued investment, even in the absence of publicly reported figures.
Central Department Store's "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" is a Thai retail campaign that ran from 7 January to 6 February 2025. It delivered Lunar New Year promotions across all Central branches in Thailand and the Central App, combining special product collections, loyalty rewards, credit-card benefits, cash coupons, and qualifying-purchase gifts under the tagline "embrace happiness, receive wealth."
The campaign ran across every Central Department Store branch in Thailand and on the Central App. This nationwide distribution gave the 2025 Lunar New Year promotion access to Central Retail's extensive physical store network, which according to centralretail.com included 85 department stores in its portfolio at the end of the first half of 2025.
Central's Chinese New Year 2025 campaign offered special festive product collections, The 1 loyalty member benefits, participating credit-card privileges, in-store cash coupons, credit-card cashback, Central App discount coupons, and gifts with qualifying purchases. The layered mechanic was designed to serve loyalty members, credit-card holders, and app-active shoppers simultaneously across Thailand.
Central Department Store has operated "The Great Chinese New Year" as an annual campaign platform since at least 2023. According to centralretail.com, the platform ran in 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026, establishing it as a recurring festive property. The 2023 edition involved a investment and was built around the creative idea of "The Great Power of Synergy."
Central Department Store set internal targets of a 10% year-on-year sales increase and a 20% rise in customer traffic for the Lunar New Year 2025 period, according to mitihoon.com. No verified post-campaign figures confirming whether those targets were achieved are publicly available at the time this case study was written.
The agency behind "The Great Chinese New Year 2025" has not been publicly disclosed. Production credits for the campaign's film asset are not publicly documented. The campaign was published in Thailand in January 2025 for Central Department Store and is categorised within the retail services sector as a film-medium campaign containing one media asset.
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