Drinking cultures in urban Vietnam and what it means for social marketing

This paper presents the early results of a study into social drinking behaviours in Vietnam with a view to gain an understanding how consumption norms are established and transferred within the cultural setting. Vietnam has an established culture of drinking for celebration, social networking and business relationship enhancement (Parker, 2010, Luu, Nguyen & Nguyen 2012). Consumption levels of alcoholic beverages such as beer and wine have been documented by organisations such as the local Health Strategy and Policy Institute (HSPI) and the World Health Organization (WHO). However, consumption of homemade alcohol beverages such as rice wine, snake wine and home-brewed beer, which are popular among the working class in Vietnam, has remained largely undocumented (HSPI 2006). This is principally because it is often difficult to record and analyse something that is produced and consumed outside formal governance processes. Data on alcohol consumption in Vietnam can be problematic. For example, the Vietnamese government official statistics indicate that alcohol consumption contributes to around seven per cent of road crashes (HSPI 2006). Luu, Nguyen and Nguyen (2012) questioned the reliability of these figures given that these data are collected by the police, who do not always have the proper equipment to confirm whether alcohol was involved in a crash. The most recent data from Forensic Medicine (2001, cited in World Health Organization 2009) listed alcohol as contributory to 34 per cent of road deaths.