VietNamNet Bridge – The same foreign traveler who spends $400-500 shopping in Thailand typically spends only $90-100 in Vietnam for souvenirs.

Vietnam received 2.48 million foreign travelers in the first eight months of the year. If each one had spent $500 shopping in Vietnam like in Thailand, Vietnam would have earned nearly $1.3 billion from tourists in the first eight months of the year, which rounds up to an annual total of nearly $2 billion in revenues from ‘exports on the spot’.

However, travelers do not spend much money in Vietnam, because, some experts said, Vietnamese goods are unattractively packaged and lack variety.

A reporter for newspaper Tuoi tre related that he met an Australian tourist, Nelly, at the huge Ben Thanh Market in HCM City. Nelly very liked some small statues of young women in ao dai playing the flute. At first, Nelly thought she’d buy ten statues as gifts to relatives when she returns home. After some thought, however, she finally decided to buy only five statues, because the statues seemed repetitiously similar: all the young women had dresses of the same colour and style.

T-shirts adorned with Vietnam’s landscapes ought to be attractive souvenirs for foreign tourists, but they don’t sell well. Nguyen Thi Tuyet Mai, who is in charge of public relations for the big travel agency, Fiditour, said that tourists do not like the T-shirts any more because the fabric is low quality and the patterns and images are done in a careless way.

Ben Thanh Market, HCM City Post Office, Dong Khoi and Le Thanh Ton Streets — well known places for serving Westerners in HCM City, are now selling cards, embroidered pictures, handbags, brocade scarves, embroidered towels, clothes and cooking in big quantities. However, the products are monotonously, relentlessly similar. There is little or no diversification in designs.

A lot of foreign tourists want to purchase Vietnam’s coffee, which is getting famous on the world market, but they do not like bad packaging. Hung, who works as a tour guide in HCM City, says he knows many tourists who bought ‘Café Vietnam’ but were really perplexed because they did not know how to brew it. The packages of coffee they bought had no instructions on brewing, nor did they provide a Vietnamese style drip filter.

Many other Vietnamese specialities — rice, fish sauce and dried food – are not well packaged or give no information about “sell-by” dates or the manufacturer.

“Foreign tourists very much like Vietnamese-styled souvenirs, but they do not have many choices,” said Nguyen Ngoc Van, the owner of ‘The Post,’ a souvenir shop at the Saigon Central Post Office.

To lure tourists, producers have to make heavier investment

Van said that he intends to change the way Vietnamese souvenirs are marketed to foreigners. The shop will sell coffee with a drip coffee filter and good packaging, including instructions on brewing. Van believes that convenience and diversification of goods are the factors that will lure tourists.

Similarly, Duong Thanh Thuy, the owner of the ‘Miss Ao Dai’ brand, says that to entice tourists to buy souvenirs, it’s important to pay attention to the quality of the packaging. Almost all of the craft products that Miss Ao Dai produces or orders are in attractive packages – often of good quality silk – and come with sufficient ‘technical information.’

Nguyen Vinh Thai of Rong Viet Values, which specializes in branding and analysis of consumer psychology, emphasizes that packaging plays a 50 to 60 percent role in consumer decisions on whether to purchase products or not.

However, it seems that Vietnamese enterprises do not want to ‘waste’ money in packaging. “They should think of good packaging as a kind of investment, not an expense,” Thai said.

VietNamNet/TT