Thai Telco Dtac Gets More Social, Adds Special Facebook Messenger Stickers

Dtac, one of the big three telephone operators in Thailand, has just rebranded its pre-paid services.

Those services used to be known by the Dtac logo accompanied by the word “Happy”. But now Dtac has followed the branding style of Nike and Apple, simplifying its logo a great deal by removing the word “Happy” from it. All that’s left is the nationally-recognized red smile. The smile has also received some retouching to modernize its look.

Pakorn Pannachet, senior vice president (market division), comments that the revamped logo for the Happy brand is part of a “shift from ‘prepaid for mass’ to ‘prepaid for data’ in response to increasing demand of data service among prepaid consumers.” Dtac is aiming to double the number of its mobile internet customers from seven million to fourteen million in the next 12 months.

Being more social

Dtac claims that:

Currently, according to Dtac customers who subscribe for data service, the use of social network accounts for over 70 percent of their daily data usage and the number tends to increase over time. Over 14 million users in Thailand regularly use Facebook on mobile devices. Among major mobile operators in Thailand, Dtac has the highest number of active Facebook users, which is equal to 50 percent of total Facebook users on mobile device in the country.

Thailand has 18 million Facebook users in total.

New social packages for Facebook, Line, Whatsapp

Dtac is also being more social by launching four new SIM card products. I’m not really that interested in three of them, but there’s one that caught my eye – the “smartphone SIM”. This SIM package offers 15 MB internet per day and unlimited usage of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Line.

On top of that, Dtac has just signed an exclusive partnership with Facebook, which means it’s the first operator in the world to offer branded stickers in the Facebook Messenger app.

Of course, it is interesting to see Facebook partnering with brands for stickers the way Line does. The details of this partnership between Dtac and Facebook are undisclosed but I doubt it came cheap. I can only hope it pays off for Dtac and that this strategy helps the brand reach its goal of providing “Internet for All”.

Dtac is also known for its dtac Accelerate campaign, in which it sends the developers of Thailand’s top 20 mobile applications to a workshop in Silicon Valley.