|
Moon cake makers scrambling for retail premises
Moon cake sales are at their highest pitch, just two weeks before the mid-autumn festival. Moon cake producers are competing fiercely for the best retail sites.
Big streets in Hanoi like Ba Trieu, Hai Ba Trung, Tay Son, Giang Vo and Ngoc Ha these days have been turned red by lanterns, stacks of cake boxes, banners and pavement displays.
What’s for sale? Mooncakes, small round white and golden brown cakes stuffed with nuts and candied fruit, the absolutely essential item for celebrating the mid-Autumn festival on October 3.
Banners, billboards everywhere
Huu Nghi Confectionary Company launched its moon cake sales campaign nearly two months ago, or one month earlier than in previous years. Huu Nghi’s Deputy Director Nguyen Minh Duc is still touring the sale points every day.
Duc said that it is not easy to be able to rent retail premises in prime positions. Companies either must have close relations with landlords, or must purchase the space for their huge advertising banners. All companies are ready to pay high to get the best sites, so they compete fiercely for them.
“We were the first mooncake company to hang our banner over the front of aretail shop on Tay Son Road in Dong Da District,” Duc said. “Another producer, then hung a bigger banner, obscuring part of ours. However, the biggest banner belongs to a third producer; it hangs from an upper floor and is as big as a sleeping mat.”
The leading mooncake makers always pay big sums of money for exclusive rights to hang banners in prime locations. Other producers pay money to small shopowners to induce them to prioritise selling their products
Le Ngoc Huy, Marketing Director of Hanoi Confectionary Company, a relatively small mooncake vendor, told a story from last year’s scramble for retail premises. At first, his company hung a banner in the front of the Asean supermarket on Pham Ngoc Thach street. A little later, the supermarket manager himself phoned to ask Huy remove the banner, because Kinh Do Confectionary Group had paid for exclusive rights to hang a mooncake banner there.
Mooncake not only pay big sums of money, but they are also ready to ‘play dirty’ in the fight for sales sites.
“Our banner was neatly hung yesterday, but it looks dirty and damaged today,” producers complain.
To protect their image, some confectionary producers hire advertising firms which refresh billboards and banners regularly. Other companies organize their own teams to clean and rehang dirty and damaged banners.
Racing to open retail network
A certain shop at No 54A Ba Trieu Street in Hanoi earns about eight billion dong in every moon cake season, or 20 to 25 percent of the total retail revenue of the Hanoi Confectionary Company. Therefore, the company thinks that it needs to open more retail shops to polish its image.
‘Retail shop’ means a shop which sells the products of one producer exclusively.
The marketing officer of the company said that along the length of Ba Trieu street alone, the number of shops vending mooncakes is up by 20 percent over last year. Big brand names dominate the big mid-autumn markets in Hanoi like Giang Vo exhibition centre, Cat Linh, Lang Ha, Ba Trieu and Kim Ma streets.
The one kilometer stretch where Cat Linh intersects Giang Vo has six retail shops selling Kinh Do and Huu Nghi confectionary producers. There were only two such shops only in the previous year.
“At first, we planned to set up two shops only. However, we later decided to increase the number of shops as our rival Kinh Do also increased its number of shops. We now have 38 retail shops in total,” said a Huu Nghi representative.
Nguyen Nga
vietnamnet
|
