Muketing: How Thais turned belief into the smartest brief in the room
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Campaigns which engage positively with Thailand’s deep-rooted spiritual belief system are reaping the benefits — as long as they follow the rules, according to Pert Pongpiti Phasukyud, founder and CEO, AD ADDICT.
Let me ask you something before we dive in. When was the last time you checked your horoscope before a big pitch? Wore a specific colour on a Monday because someone told you it was lucky? Hesitated to book a launch date that just felt … off?
If you said never — fair enough. But if you’re sitting in Cannes right now next to someone from Thailand, I’d wager good money that they nodded. Probably without realising they did.
Because in Thailand, belief isn’t a personality trait. It isn’t something you grow out of when you get a university degree or a LinkedIn profile. It’s infrastructure. It shapes mornings, decisions, purchases, and relationships — and if you’re a brand paying attention, it shapes the most powerful creative briefs you’ll ever encounter.
We have a word for what happens when that belief meets marketing. We call it Muketing.
The word is a mashup — and it’s worth unpacking, because the mashup itself tells you everything. Mutelu is Thailand’s umbrella term for the sprawling belief ecosystem that quietly runs alongside everyday life here — an eclectic mix of Buddhist traditions, Brahman Hindu rituals, Chinese superstition, astrology, animism, feng shui, spirit worship, lucky numbers, sacred amulets, deity devotion, auspicious dates, fortune-telling, and whatever else might tilt fate slightly in your favour.
Everything that sits in the magnificent grey zone between faith and fate. Marketing, you already know.
Put them together and you get Muketing — the strategy of building brands with belief, not just around it. It sounds niche. The numbers say otherwise.
Over 88% of Thais engage with Mutelu practices in some form. Thailand’s faith economy is estimated at 15bn baht roughly $400m. In 2024, Mutelu related content racked up nearly four billion social media engagements in a single year.
And the generation driving all of that? Gen Z. The same cohort your digital strategy is desperately trying to reach on TikTok is also setting their phone wallpapers to sacred yantra images and consulting astrologers before accepting job offers. They don’t see a contradiction. In Thailand, belief systems rarely compete.
They stack. The brands getting this right have stopped looking for one.
Here’s what a fairly ordinary Thai morning looks like — and I say this as someone who lives it. You wake up and check the colour you’re supposed to wear today. Yes, there’s a day colour system. Yes, millions follow it.
Your phone wallpaper is probably a deity, kept there less out of devotion and more because why wouldn’t you want something watching your back? Before booking an important meeting, you check the calendar for an auspicious date.
Your phone number was almost certainly vetted against your birth chart at some point. There’s an amulet somewhere on your person. None of this feels dramatic. None of it feels
irrational. It’s just Tuesday.
And that’s exactly the point. Muketing isn’t about tapping into an exotic niche. It’s about
engaging with the actual texture of how Thai consumers move through the world — the
habits, rituals and quiet convictions that shape decisions long before a purchase is made.
So if you’re a brand thinking about jumping into this space — good. But belief isn’t a trend you can just slide into. It has rules. Unwritten ones, mostly. And getting them wrong doesn’t just mean a campaign that doesn’t land. It means a community that doesn’t forget.
Here are three cases that taught us what those rules actually look like in practice. Three brands. Three different entry points. Three very different lessons about what it means to build with belief — not just borrow it.
Rule 1: Don’t mock the brief. Master it.
For years, a superstition had been quietly circulating through Thailand’s healthcare community: order KFC during your hospital shift and you will be overwhelmed with patients. Some even say it’s because the spirits love fried chicken so much that they show up and bring the whole ward with them.
This is, objectively, wonderful. It’s also a brand problem. KFC had become — without any involvement on their part — an unwelcome sight in hospital wards. Doctors, nurses, and healthcare workers across the country were informally avoiding the chicken. A global brand, culturally banned not by regulation but by ghost story. Most brands would have ignored it. Some might have launched a cheeky social campaign trying to debunk it.
Both would have missed the point entirely. KFC Thailand did something far smarter: they took the superstition completely seriously and solved it on its own supernatural terms.
They created the ‘This Is Not KFC’ collection — special edition packaging designed in the visual language of traditional Thai curse-breaking. Boxes printed with ‘This does not contain
Fried Chicken’. ‘No WingZ Zabb inside’. Messages addressed directly to the spirits, engineered to create just enough ambiguity that the curse couldn’t find its target.
Released on Thai Doctors’ Day, exclusively at branches near hospitals, the campaign became a national moment. It picked up awards for cultural intelligence. More importantly, it worked because the team never once winked at the audience or suggested the belief was silly. They respected it enough to engage with it in its own language. The first thing Muketing asks of you isn’t creativity. It’s humility.
Rule 2: Don’t interrupt the ritual. Join it.
Some brands dip a toe into belief culture once, get a good headline, and move on. Tinder Thailand did something smarter: they committed to it.
In 2022, they showed up at the Trimurti Shrine outside CentralWorld — Bangkok’s most beloved sacred site for love on Valentine’s Day. The campaign was called ‘LOVE destiNATION’. Stickers on the ground read: ‘Pray and swipe right’. Free offering sets. A photo booth so people could shoot their new profile photos right there, still warm from a
prayer.
It was humble, light touch, and perfectly timed. It didn’t compete with the ritual. It just made itself useful at the exact moment people were most ready to be found.
Then they paid attention. And in May 2026, they came back — differently. The new campaign, ‘The 24-Hour Mutelu Convenience Store’, was built around Tinder’s newly launched Astrology Mode: a pop-up at the same Central World plaza, next to the same shrine, featuring four activity zones. Free to enter — but only if you showed a Tinder profile with Astrology Mode activated.
The concept: when the shrine closes, your destiny stays open. The belief doesn’t have business hours. Neither does the algorithm.
The difference between 2022 and 2026 isn’t just scale. In 2022, Tinder stood next to the belief. In 2026, the belief became the product mechanic — the entry ticket, the matching filter, the whole reason to show up.
Thai Tinder data showed Leo as the number-one zodiac sign among users, followed by Libra and Scorpio. Star signs weren’t small talk. They were compatibility infrastructure. And Tinder built their campaign on that truth. That’s what Muketing looks like when a brand plays a long game.
Rule 3: Don’t just show up. Live in the routine.
Most Muketing is built around a moment — a campaign drops, people notice, it travels, it ends. Shokubutsu had a different ambition entirely. They wanted to live in your bathroom.
Shokubutsu is Thailand’s number-one selling shower cream — three years running.
For their anniversary in 2024, they didn’t launch a new scent or sign a celebrity. They called Mor Chang: Ajarn Tossaporn Sritula, Thailand’s most famous astrologer, a household name whose annual predictions make actual news.
His brief was unusual: design four scents, one for each elemental type in the zodiac system — Earth, Water, Wind, Fire — each mapped to the emotional states and energy those elements govern. The logic draws from both feng shui and aroma psychology. Scent changes your state. Your element governs your natural energy. Use the Water scent before sleep, governing relaxation and emotional release. Use the Wind scent be-
fore leaving the house, because Wind activates
creative thinking and outward momentum.
The result was Shokubutsu Zodiac — four colours, four scents, 500ml at 99 baht, sold exclusively at Lotus’ as a limited edition. It sold out. But the real product wasn’t the shower
gel. It was the ritual. The shower — something millions of people do every single day, often
twice a day, without thinking — became a spiritual practice. Not on a special occasion. Not during a campaign window. Every morning. Every evening. For as long as the bottle lasted.
Belief embedded in a daily habit doesn’t need a campaign to keep it alive. The routine does that for you, quietly, on its own.
That’s what makes this case different from everything else in this piece. The others were moments of genius. This one was patience. And in Muketing, patience is the rarest brief of all.
Muketing is not a technique you can copy. You can’t reverse-engineer these campaigns by adding a lucky symbol to your packaging or timing a product drop to an auspicious date.
The work that earns the right to play in this space is built on genuine cultural understanding — on knowing why people hold the convictions they hold, not just that they hold them.
Every market has beliefs that the brief never mentions. Convictions that live in the objects people carry, the numbers they consider lucky, the dates they avoid, the rituals they perform without thinking. Things that shape millions of decisions every day without ever appearing in a focus group, a strategy deck or a creative brief.
Three brands in this piece found those convictions. One solved a ghost story. One waited for a shrine to close. One moved into a bathroom. None of them invented the belief. They just took it seriously enough to build something real around it. That’s the whole game.
So that’s the lesson. Not a framework. Not a playbook. Just the willingness to ask a question most briefs are too sensible to ask: What does your audience believe that you’ve been too rational to take seriously?
The answer to that question is the most valuable brief in your market right now. Someone is
going to find it. Make sure it’s you!
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