Bridging the data divide: Achieving personalisation in Thailand’s fragmented ecosystem

In Thailand’s rapidly shifting market, brands face unique hurdles in achieving a unified view of the customer. The dominance of social commerce means consumers frequently research, engage and purchase directly through channels such as LINE, TikTok and Facebook. This creates fragmented data silos that are notoriously difficult to consolidate. Furthermore, with Thailand's Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in full effect, marketers must carefully navigate how they collect and activate first-party data.

At a recent MARKETING-INTERACTIVE roundtable in Bangkok, in partnership with Supermetrics, senior leaders across hospitality, FMCG, insurance and retail converged to discuss a critical challenge: how can an organisation overcome these hurdles to build a secure, connected data ecosystem?

Moving beyond vanity metrics to real business outcomes

With the cost of personalisation efforts rising, marketing teams are under immense pressure to prove value. The discussion opened with an evaluation of the metrics that truly matter.

Harjyot Singh Arora, head of media, digital and investments for Asia at PepsiCo, outlined a shift to ROI-led decision-making, moving beyond vanity metrics to measurable incrementality.

“Every dollar is accountable,” he said, with business impact outweighing completion rates.

He added that PepsiCo complements this with advanced analytics & MMM to test whether personalisation drives stronger retail sales and brand salience than non-personalised efforts.

For brands with complex, long-term customer journeys, the focus is on enhancing the perceived value of the product. Oscar Lee Wen Siew, director of product management, experience design and brand communications at Minor Vacation Club, explained that his organisation’s richest data comes from its owners.

“In a Vacation Club model, the proposition can be multi-layered, so one of our key priorities is helping our Club Points Owners better understand the full range of benefits and experiences available to them,” he said. “Through greater personalisation, we can make each interaction more relevant, timely and actionable — ultimately supporting stronger engagement and usage.”

Breaking down silos with real-time activation

While organisations often have the vision for hyper-personalisation, execution remains a significant roadblock. Byron Munson, vice president, APJ at Supermetrics, referenced an industry report noting that more than 75% of marketers have not yet achieved personalisation at scale.

“It's not that we haven't been trying to do so, it's just that complexity is stalling it,” Munson explained.

A primary issue is the reliance on static CRM data rather than dynamic, in-the-moment signals. Jan Willem van Walsum, data activation lead, APJ at Supermetrics, challenged the room to consider how live behavioural signals could augment static profiles.

“Most people are sharing about using CRM or PMS level data effectively as a source of truth,” van Walsum observed. “But if I am a fan of a luxury hotel brand, yet right now I am looking for a different type of trip and don't want to spend on luxury, that needs to change immediately. The reality is, it doesn't, because you're basing it on data that is already stale.”

To combat this, Tom Midzic, head of marketing AIA Thailand digital platforms at AIA Thailand, shared that his team uses a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to unify customer profiles from various touchpoints. The segmentation is done within the CDP, which then triggers campaigns across different platforms, attempting to bridge the gap between fragmented channels.

However, data silos are not just technological; they are often organisational, some highlighting internal data permissioning as a major hurdle.

Often in the hospitality sector, corporate teams strictly restrict property-level access to CRM campaigns out of fear of data leakage or misuse. Yet, this cautious approach creates a major missed opportunity. Because on-the-ground outlets naturally understand their local, loyal customer base far better than a global headquarters can, keeping tight control means leaving immense potential on the table.

A regional hospitality marketing leader highlighted the human element of these operational hurdles. “We have the systems and the training in place,” they explained. “But the real challenge is getting buy-in from ground-level operational staff to ensure guest preferences and insights are actually recorded and fully utilised.”

Bridging the offline-to-online gap

For industries rooted in physical experiences, seamlessly merging offline and online customer journeys remains the holy grail.

Mathurada Yongchareon, head of marketing at CHAGEE Thailand, shared a success story of bridging this gap through a recent Hello Kitty collaboration. The campaign utilised offline events and in-store activations to drive consumers to the brand’s app.

“At the event itself, we invited people to download the app and encouraged them to use it to order, which helps them save waiting time,” she explained. “From there, we were able to engage our customers more meaningfully, giving them always-on sharing content and loyalty incentives.”

In the hospitality sector, Rabin Gupta, corporate director of digital marketing at Centara Hotels & Resorts, emphasised the brand’s focus on strengthening guest insights to enable deeper, more meaningful personalisation.

“The whole idea is not just to book a room, but to enable the booking engine to book an experience,” Gupta said.

Within retail-driven ecosystems, third-party partnerships play a pivotal role. Arora shared that PepsiCo leverages external data collaborations to better align digital engagement with offline outcomes. “It helps us connect targeted communications to retail performance and identify the levers that influence conversion,” he said.

Navigating PDPA and data hygiene

Underpinning all these strategies is the critical need for compliance. Midzic referred to PDPA as a ‘common enemy’ for marketers, yet a vital necessity, highlighting the delicate balance between delivering targeted ads and maintaining strict privacy governance.

Setthaphop Sattayathanaroj, head of digital commerce at FrieslandCampina, stressed that explicit consent is the foundation of their digital strategy. “When it comes to 1st party data collection and meaningful utilisation, we need to ensure that every data point we collect from our consumers is consented to by them. That is first and foremost,” he said.

However, managing this consent in real-time is operationally taxing. Shilpika Thapaliya, digital marketing manager at La Miniera Pool Villas Pattaya, highlighted the heavy manual burden teams face during ongoing or recurring retargeting campaigns.

“If a guest opts out while a campaign is active, that change isn't immediately reflected in the database itself,” she explained. “Consequently, when it's time to run recurring retargeting campaigns, we have to manually clean the lists to remove those opted-out users. Pushing real-time quality database checks to active campaigns remains a significant challenge.”

Ultimately, the roundtable highlighted that while the road to seamless, compliant and real-time personalisation is fraught with technical and cultural challenges, marketers must keep pushing forward. As Arora concluded, “Consistency would supersede perfection. Keep investing, keep learning, and keep creating.”

Acknowledgements

This roundtable and article were made possible by our partner, Supermetrics.

Supermetrics is a marketing intelligence platform that helps organisations move from understanding past performance to driving future action. Trusted by more than 200,000 companies in 120 countries, Supermetrics unifies the marketing intelligence workflow from data connectivity to insight to activation, enabling confident, revenue-focused decisions. Processing 15% of global advertising spend, Supermetrics helps brands and agencies navigate marketing with confidence in today's evolving data landscape.

To learn more about Supermetrics Data Activation please visit: https://supermetrics.com/platform/activate-data or scan the QR code.