A Central Retail VP Says Every Shopper Is Becoming a Seller

A vice president at one of Southeast Asia's largest retail conglomerates says the basic structure of his own industry no longer describes how Thai people actually shop. Central Retail Corporation runs more than 3,500 stores across Thailand and Vietnam under brands that shape daily life across the region (Central and Robinson department stores, Big C and Tops supermarkets, Thaiwatsadu, Power Buy, B2S), all built on the traditional chain of wholesaler to retailer to consumer. On a recent episode of Students Incorporated, the company's own vice president of business development, digital marketing, and social commerce, Khun Task, told hosts Mia and Frank that the chain is already broken: ordinary consumers, he said, have started becoming retailers themselves, filming and selling products directly to each other instead of walking into any of his stores.

Every Shopper, a Storefront

The shift Khun Task described isn't speculation. It's a market that already has a scoreboard. TikTok Shop's global sales reached roughly $33 billion in 2024, and Southeast Asia has historically accounted for more than 90 percent of the platform's item volume worldwide, according to a statistical review published by marketing analytics firm Marketing LTB. Thailand sits among the platform's leading Southeast Asian markets, alongside Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Indonesia, inside a seller base that has grown past 15 million active storefronts globally. Live commerce, the livestreamed, host-narrated selling format that dominates the platform in Southeast Asia, converts shoppers into buyers at rates the same review calls "substantially higher" than ordinary feed-based shopping, which helps explain why so many of those millions of sellers are individuals rather than registered brands.

Thailand is a particularly sharp version of the pattern Khun Task is describing. A Digital 2025 report from the research firm We Are Social, cited by Nation Thailand in August 2025, found Thailand has the world's second-highest share of monthly active TikTok users of any country: more than eight in ten Thai internet users open the app every month, against a global average of three in ten. That's the same audience, inside the same app, that Central Retail's own marketing budget now has to compete against for attention.

From an ICS Classroom to Central Retail's C-Suite

Khun Task's own path to that job runs directly through the school that produces this podcast. He told Mia and Frank he attended ICS from kindergarten through seventh grade before earning two bachelor's degrees and a master's degree spanning economics, supply chain, and law, then working his way through marketing roles at Colgate-Palmolive, Nestlé, and True Corporation, then into a sales management job at Google helping traditionally offline-first clients justify shifting budget into digital advertising. That job, he said, taught him the lesson he now applies at Central Retail: a real marketing plan isn't only a communications plan. It has to cover the full mix (product, price, promotion, and placement) with data attached at every stage so a company can actually measure what it's spending and improving, rather than guessing.

The Ten-Second Myth, and the Real Problem

Khun Task's case for why relevance now matters more than reach rests partly on a specific number: he told the hosts that the human attention span, even in Thailand, has fallen to about 10 seconds. It's a version of a claim that has circulated in marketing circles for two decades, and it rests on shakier ground than its popularity suggests. The commonly cited "8-second attention span, shorter than a goldfish" statistic traces back to a Microsoft-commissioned study from the mid-2010s that measured how long people lingered on a webpage before clicking away, a measure of browsing behavior, not sustained cognitive focus, according to a review of the underlying research published this year by psychology writer Octavio Ortega Esteban. The goldfish comparison doesn't hold up either; fish-cognition research shows goldfish can retain memories for months. Peer-reviewed attention studies, including work by researcher Donna Bunce and colleagues, instead find that people can sustain focused attention on engaging tasks for 45 to 90 minutes at a stretch.

What has actually changed, per that research, isn't the length of human attention so much as its selectivity: people have gotten pickier, not more distractible, deciding faster what's worth their focus and tuning out everything else. That reframing doesn't undercut Khun Task's broader argument so much as sharpen it. If the real fight retailers face isn't for scraps of a shrinking attention span but for selective attention that has to be earned through relevance, then his emphasis on real-time, data-driven personalization over generic mass messaging is aimed at exactly the right target, even if the specific number he cited is closer to folklore than science. Industry figures elsewhere in Thailand are framing the problem in nearly identical terms without the shaky statistic: DAAT president Paruj Daorai told reporters in August 2025 that in a world increasingly shaped by AI, "consumer attention has become the new battleground for marketers," a description of the fight that lines up with Khun Task's, even if the two never compared notes.

The Ad Money Moved Faster Than Anyone Guessed

The headline news segment ahead of Khun Task's interview cited a forecast that, within months, turned out to badly understate what actually happened. Hosts reported that Thailand's digital ad spending was projected to grow 10 percent in 2025 to roughly 35 billion baht, a forecast from the Digital Advertising Association of Thailand (DAAT) that held at the time the episode aired in May. By August, DAAT had cut that growth forecast to just 5 percent, the lowest rate on record outside the Covid-19 pandemic years, as Thailand's GDP growth outlook was cut from 2 percent to 1 percent and consumer confidence weakened, Nation Thailand reported.

TikTok defied that slowdown entirely. While overall digital ad spending cooled, TikTok's ad revenue in Thailand jumped 63 percent year-over-year to 6.776 billion baht, overtaking YouTube for the No. 2 spot and closing to within 1.675 billion baht of market leader Meta, according to the same DAAT figures. The platform Khun Task named as the frontline of the "everyone's a retailer" shift is also the one advertisers kept funding even as they pulled back nearly everywhere else, a sign that money, not just attention, is already moving the way he described.

A Portfolio Under Pressure

Central Retail's own moves since the episode aired back up Khun Task's urgency. In September 2025, the company sold its Italian department store chain, Rinascente, to the Chirathivat family for roughly $296 million, exiting the European market to redirect the proceeds, paid out to shareholders as special dividends, toward what its 2025 earnings report calls "high-potential core markets including Thailand, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia." The company closed 2025 with 253.165 billion baht in continuing-operations revenue, up 4 percent year-over-year, while its own chief financial officer described a wholesale and retail sector facing "significant challenges and multidimensional pressures." Doubling down on the exact markets where Khun Task says shoppers are turning into competitors is a real bet, not a hedge.

Some of that bet looks like a direct answer to the trend he described rather than a defense against it. Central Retail's 2025 results credit Robinson Lifestyle's rollout of night markets and outdoor zones, built explicitly, in the company's own words, to "create business opportunities for local SMEs," small sellers renting space inside a mall rather than competing against it. The company's loyalty program, The 1, has surpassed 23 million members in Thailand, the kind of direct customer data Khun Task described as the raw material for the real-time personalization he says has replaced one-size-fits-all marketing.

Curiosity, Then Execution

Khun Task's advice to students interested in business wasn't really about marketing tactics at all. Retail, he told the hosts, is only going to get more competitive as more consumers double as sellers, and the traits that matter for surviving it are curiosity, problem-solving, communication, and the discipline to prioritize. He was most emphatic, though, about pairing ambition with realism.

If passion doesn't translate to money, it just doesn't work.

Vision without execution goes nowhere, he said, and execution without vision fails for the same reason from the opposite direction. For a class of students watching their own weekly podcast turn into something closer to a media operation than a school project, that's a fairly literal instruction: pick something worth doing, and then actually ship it, before someone with a phone and a TikTok account does it first.

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