Calendars · 11 min
Cohort windows for festival commerce
Songkran browse is not a Q2 strategy. If you drop those sessions into the same cohort as a quiet Tuesday in July, you will congratulate yourself for weather.
Thai Mobile Spend Patterns exists because national averages during festival weeks are a kind of self-flattery. Traffic arrives because the country is awake, travelling, and on the phone. Orders that stick have a different shape: prepaid more often in Bangkok, COD more often elsewhere, returns delayed because riders also went home.
A usable festival cohort window is shorter than marketing wants. We use: three days before the public holiday, the holiday block itself, and four days after last-mile resumes. Anything wider starts mixing “people were bored in traffic” with “people bought a gift they will keep.”
What to compare
Do not compare Songkran GMV to the prior week. Compare accepted parcels per session, split by province, against the same festival last year. If you lack last year, compare against another dense weekend — a major live-sale — not against a random Wednesday.
Then look at the quiet residue: SKUs that still sold after the fireworks. That residue is closer to assortment truth. The spike is closer to calendar.
Where students push back
Finance teams want one number for the board. We do not give it. The Observatory Desk briefings after a cohort are often just this argument, repeated until someone agrees to show two lines instead of one. It is not glamorous. It is how you stop firing a buyer for a festival that was never theirs.