Why One National Tết Calendar Misses at Both Ends
Tết is the commercial peak of the Vietnamese year for fast-moving consumer goods, and nothing else on the calendar comes close. Households begin planning weeks ahead of the holiday, the heaviest buying compresses into the final stretch before it, and consumption carries on well after the public holiday itself has ended. For a brand running trade schemes, that is not one event. It is three distinct commercial windows with different buyer intent, different pack preferences and different stock risk in each.
The complication that catches most national scheme calendars is regional. Retailers in the north, around Hanoi and the Red River Delta, tend to build festive stock a long way out, taking depth early and holding it. Retailers in the south, in and around Ho Chi Minh City, tend to compress their buying into a much shorter window closer to the holiday, leaning on faster replenishment instead of early depth. Both behaviours are rational for the trade that surrounds them. Neither is served well by a scheme that opens on a single national date.
Run one calendar across the whole country and it fails twice. In the north it opens too late, after retailers have already committed shelf space and working capital. In the south it opens too early, funding stock the outlet was going to buy anyway. The calendar has to run on a regional clock, which makes territory and coverage planning a direct input into promotion design rather than a separate exercise.
Building the Scheme Calendar Around Three Phases
The cleanest way to structure a Tết programme is to stop treating it as one campaign and instead define three phases, each with its own objective, its own mechanic and its own budget line.
Phase one: early preparation and depth
The first phase exists to get stock into the trade and to secure shelf and floor space before competitors do. The objective is placement, not sell-out, so the mechanics that work here are slab-based purchase schemes, free-goods offers on qualifying case quantities, and display incentives tied to a photographed shelf or gondola. This phase should open materially earlier in northern territories than in southern ones. Budget released here buys position, and position is what the following phase converts.
Phase two: core festive spend
The second phase is the short, intense window when consumer offtake peaks, and the risk shifts from placement to availability. Schemes here should be light on paperwork and fast to settle, because distributors are running at capacity and reps have less time per call. Replenishment-linked incentives, quick-turn bundle offers and simple display top-up rewards beat a slab structure nobody has time to calculate. A stock-out also costs most here, because a shopper in a tạp hóa days before the holiday will substitute rather than wait.
Phase three: post-Tết consumption
The third phase is routinely underplanned. Consumption continues after the holiday while the trade sits on whatever it did not sell, and reps return to routes disrupted for days. Schemes here should clear residual festive stock rather than push more of it: liquidation offers on gift packs, conversion offers that move shoppers back to everyday packs, and a returns position agreed before the season starts. Getting phase three right is what stops phase one depth turning into a write-off.
Designing Mechanics for Two Very Different Buyers
Vietnam runs a genuinely dual-channel trade, and a Tết scheme has to speak to both halves of it. Independent tạp hóa outlets and traditional markets remain the backbone of general trade, and consumer preference for them is strongest around the holiday, while the minimart format expands hard into neighbourhoods and provinces that were previously general trade only. The two buyers sit in the same territory and respond to almost nothing in common.
A tạp hóa owner is making a working-capital decision with their own money, in a shop where every metre of shelf has an opportunity cost. What moves that decision is immediate, visible and certain value: free goods in the same case, an on-invoice discount they can see without arithmetic, a gift-with-purchase item they can put in the window, or a cash-equivalent benefit that lands quickly. Deferred rebates and quarterly accrual schemes are weak currency here, because the owner has to trust that the credit will arrive and has no easy way to verify it.
A minimart or supermarket buyer is making a category decision inside a chain process. What moves that decision is a listing commitment, agreed display space, a joint promotion plan with a defined mechanic and a settlement route their finance team recognises. Free goods poured into the same chain without a plan simply distort the stock file. The two mechanics need separate budgets, separate approval routes and separate performance measurement, and confusing them is the most common way Tết spend disappears without a trace. Splitting the design this way is the same discipline that governs selling across the tạp hóa and minimart channels for the rest of the year, applied under seasonal pressure.
Gifting Packs and Bundles, and the SKU Problem They Create
Tết is a gifting occasion before it is a consumption occasion, and gifting drives a wave of temporary pack formats: festive cartons, multi-brand hampers, promotional bundles and limited-run packaging in seasonal colours. Commercially these are the highest-value items of the season. Operationally they are the ones most likely to break the system.
Every festive pack is a new item that needs a code, a price, a tax treatment, a barcode and a defined life. Bundles built by combining existing items need to deplete their components correctly, or the warehouse will show stock that does not exist. Seasonal packs also carry a hard commercial expiry that has nothing to do with product shelf life, because a festive carton is close to worthless the week after the holiday. That means the item master has to carry the seasonal packs as first-class items with clear activation and deactivation dates, and it means batch and expiry discipline has to hold under the highest throughput of the year rather than only in quiet months. Structured item and pack management is the difference between a gift range that clears and one that ends up in a returns pile.
The other half of the problem is pricing. Seasonal packs frequently carry a different margin structure from the everyday range, and the scheme attached to them often differs by channel and by region. Price and scheme have to be defined together and published to the field at the same moment, or reps will quote from memory and distributors will invoice against a version nobody agreed.
Capturing Claims and Settling Them Quickly
Nothing damages a Tết programme faster than a distributor waiting months for a credit note. The distributor funds the free goods, the display payments and the discounts at the moment of sale, out of their own working capital, at exactly the point in the year when that capital is stretched thinnest. If settlement is slow, the practical result is that the distributor quietly under-invests in the next scheme, and the brand never learns why participation fell.
The fix is to capture the claim where the evidence is created rather than reconstructing it afterwards from spreadsheets. A display scheme should be claimed against the photograph the rep took in the outlet, timestamped and located. A purchase slab should be calculated from the invoiced quantity the system already holds, not from a claim the distributor types in later. A gift-with-purchase should be traceable to the specific outlet that received it. When claims arrive as structured records with their proof attached, validation becomes a review of exceptions instead of a full reconstruction, and settlement moves from months to days.
Vietnam's e-invoicing regime helps here more than most brands expect. Electronic invoicing has been mandatory for every business since 1 July 2022, and the rules have since been amended and their penalties restructured. That means the invoice trail underpinning a claim is already electronic and already consistent, so scheme settlement can be reconciled against it directly rather than against paper. A distributor portal that shows each partner their own claims, their status and their expected settlement date removes most of the phone calls a Tết season generates, and the credit exposure that builds behind those claims connects straight into distributor credit and collections.
Guarding Against Leakage and Grey-Market Diversion
Seasonal schemes attract leakage because the value on offer is unusually high and the season is unusually chaotic. The failure modes are predictable. Free goods intended for small outlets are consolidated and resold. Discounted festive stock bought in one region is moved into another where the scheme never opened, undercutting the local price. Display payments are claimed for shelves that were never built. Counterfeit and grey-market goods, already a named challenge in the Vietnamese market, ride into the trade on the noise of the peak.
Controls that work are the ones designed in before the season, not investigated after it. Scheme eligibility should be defined against a validated outlet universe, so a benefit can only be claimed for a real, classified, geo-tagged store. Claim volumes per outlet should be capped against that outlet's normal purchase profile, so a small tạp hóa cannot suddenly claim wholesale quantities. Display and visibility claims should require dated, located photographic proof, which makes store audit and compliance checks part of the promotion mechanic rather than a separate audit programme. Batch and case-level records should make it possible to establish where a consignment was intended to go when stock turns up somewhere it should not. And exception reporting should run during the season, weekly at minimum, because a diversion pattern found in February is a report, while one found in December is a recoverable loss.
Mid-Autumn, the Secondary Peak Worth Planning Properly
Tết dominates the conversation to the point that Vietnam's second real seasonal peak often gets a rushed plan. The Mid-Autumn Festival is a genuine gifting and confectionery occasion, and for the categories it touches it is a significant commercial window in its own right. It is also shorter and sharper than Tết, with a pronounced cliff immediately afterwards, which makes over-stocking far more punishing.
Treating Mid-Autumn as a rehearsal for Tết is a practical way to use it twice. The same seasonal pack setup, the same claim capture route, the same display evidence standard and the same regional phasing logic all get exercised on a smaller budget, a few months before the year's largest programme depends on them. Problems found during Mid-Autumn are cheap. The same problems found in the final weeks before Tết are not.
How 1Channel Helps Plan Trade Schemes Around Tết
1Channel gives brands and their distributors one place to define seasonal schemes, publish them to the right territories on the right dates, capture claims with their evidence attached, and settle them without a month of reconciliation. Because the platform is cloud based, a scheme change approved at head office reaches every Sales Supervisor, Area Sales Manager and Field Sales Representative in the affected region on the same day, which is what regional phasing actually requires in practice.
For a Tết programme specifically, the platform supports:
- Region-phased scheme calendars so northern and southern territories can open, run and close the same programme on different dates without maintaining two separate scheme books.
- Channel-specific mechanics so general trade slab and free-goods offers for tạp hóa and traditional-market outlets run alongside listing, display and joint-promotion agreements for minimart, supermarket and hypermarket accounts, each with its own budget and approval route.
- Seasonal pack and bundle handling with activation and deactivation dates, component depletion for bundles, and batch and expiry tracking that holds up at peak throughput.
- Claim capture at the point of evidence, with geo-tagged and timestamped display photographs, slab benefits calculated from invoiced quantities, and gift-with-purchase traced to the receiving outlet.
- Faster settlement in VND, with distributor-visible claim status, automated validation of routine claims, exception routing for the rest, and reconciliation against invoice records in a market where e-invoicing has been mandatory since 1 July 2022.
- Leakage controls and in-season analytics, including outlet-level claim caps against normal purchase profiles, eligibility restricted to a validated outlet universe, and weekly exception reporting that surfaces diversion patterns while the season is still running.
Run Your Tết Schemes Without the Settlement Backlog
Design region-phased seasonal schemes, capture claims with proof attached and settle distributors quickly with 1Channel's trade promotion management module.
Explore Trade Promotion Management →Key Takeaways
Tết rewards brands that plan it as a structured, regionally phased programme and punishes those that treat it as one large national push.
- Phase the calendar, do not flatten it. Early preparation, core festive spend and post-Tết consumption each need their own objective, mechanic and budget line rather than a single seasonal offer.
- Open on a regional clock. Northern retailers typically build festive stock well ahead while southern retailers compress into a shorter window, so one national start date arrives late in the north and early in the south.
- Design twice for two buyers. A tạp hóa owner responds to immediate, verifiable value while a minimart or supermarket buyer works through listings, display agreements and a recognised settlement route.
- Treat festive packs as real items. Gift cartons and bundles need codes, prices, activation and deactivation dates and correct component depletion, or the season ends in phantom stock and returns.
- Settle claims in days, not months. Capturing claims where the evidence is created, and reconciling against records in an already-mandatory e-invoicing regime, protects distributor working capital and future participation.
- Build leakage controls before the season opens. Validated outlet eligibility, per-outlet claim caps, dated photographic proof and weekly exception reporting catch diversion while it is still recoverable.
Used well, the Mid-Autumn Festival becomes a low-cost rehearsal for all of the above, so the systems carrying Vietnam's largest trade season have already been proven on a smaller one.
