The Condom King of Thailand

At the Cabbages and Condoms restaurant in Bangkok, the chandeliers are made out of condoms. The bowl where you expect to find dinner mints is filled with condoms. There is a life-sized Santa Claus made out of – you guessed it – condoms. And it was here that I found myself last summer in the unlikely situation of sharing pad thai with 20 economists in a room full of condoms.

The restaurant is a favorite of behavioral economists. It is the brainchild of Mechai Viravaidya – known as the Condom King of Thailand, or Mr. Condom for short – an economist who changed the course of that country’s destiny by affecting behavior change on an unprecedented scale.

In the 1970s, Thailand was plagued by widespread poverty. The average family had 7 children, and the population growth rate was 3.3%. This, against a culturally conservative backdrop where birth control was virtually non-existent. Family planning was a critical, but formidable, behavior change challenge.
 
Enter Mr. Condom. His mission: make contraception available and acceptable for all. 

To reach the 80% of the country without access to doctors, Mechai cobbled together a network of rural distributors that included village shopkeepers, rice farmers, silk weavers, even undertakers, training them to prescribe birth control pills and supply condoms.  Monks blessed contraceptives with holy water. Teachers were trained in family planning, and condom-blowing competitions were held in schools. The “Cops and Rubbers” program armed the police force with condoms to distribute in traffic jams. A decade later, the birth rate was plummeting, and Mechai turned his attention to a new crisis: HIV. Free condoms were everywhere – restaurants, night clubs, hotel minibars, schools, taxi cabs.

Mechai’s efforts have been extremely effective by any measure. By 2000, the average number of children per family had dropped to 1.5 and the population growth rate to 0.5%. New cases of HIV declined by 90% in the 1990s. In 2007, Mechai was recognized with a $1MM Gates Foundation Award for Global Health. And, in the ultimate homage, condoms are now known in Thailand as “mechais.”
 
The 4 strategies that made it work:

Entertainment.
Mechai injected humor into everything. At the foundation was education, but the way he did it, it felt more like entertainment.

Collaboration.
He insisted that everyone join in – politicians, the public, religious leaders, schools, the media – and work together toward a common goal.

Incentives.
Financial incentives were woven into the mix. Micro credit programs offered loans only to non-pregnant women. Participating radio stations were given extra airtime in which to earn advertising revenue. To engage business owners in HIV prevention, the message aimed at the bottom line: “Sick staff don’t work and dead customers don’t buy.”

Branding.
Mechai understood the importance of names, taglines, and mascots. This included a superhero character named Captain Condom who made appearances at high-profile events. “You need a symbol,” Mechai explained.

“Captain Condom had a Harvard MBA,” Mechai has noted. “And this is probably the best thing he’s done with his MBA.”
If you'd like to watch Mechai's TED Talk, How Mr. Condom Made Thailand a Better Place for Life and Love, you can view it here.

If you'd like to chat about behavior change strategies, making love better, or the best things to do with your Harvard MBA, drop me a line.