(Source: Retail in Asia | August 30, 2017)
Adobe’s 2017 Creative Pulse research surveyed more than 5,000 creative and marketing professionals and examined the role of design and creativity in businesses transformation across Asia Pacific (APAC).
Markets surveyed include Hong Kong, India, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, Southeast Asia, Taiwan and China mainland. Among them, 571 respondents were from Hong Kong.
Results show that Hong Kong creatives place social media investment as the top key strategic investment, higher than customer experience. This is in contrast to other countries across the Asia Pacific who place customer experience as being of higher importance.
According to the survey, over half of APAC creatives surveyed say customer experience is the key strategic investment of their companies, followed by social (53%) and content (43%). However, Hong Kong respondents regard social media (60%) as the major strategic investment, followed by customer experience (44%) and digitisation and automation (36%).
Hong Kong respondents also see social media impact (51%) as the next disruptor in the creative industry.
As social media has played a dominating part in strategic investment in Hong Kong, the importance of refining the quality of content at speed is likely to grow. Across Asia Pacific, budget was seen as the biggest challenge to achieving content velocity (46%).
But Hong Kong again stood out in APAC as having a different popular response. 44% of Hong Kong respondents said internal production processes hindered content velocity, followed by budget (43%) and conflicting business and creative views of content (41%).
Alan Chan, general manager of digital media for Hong Kong and Taiwan at Adobe highlighted that “while many organisations have been focused on digital transformation and experiences, people still expect great physical experiences as well. Simply transferring an existing ordinary experience onto a digital platform is not becoming an Experience Business.”
Hong Kong creatives agreed that the merging of online and offline experience was a key game changer in the creative industry; this was mirrored by respondents across APAC.
Online and offline experiences are being driven by new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, powered by artificial intelligence, and regarded as a tool to support and stimulate creativity.
Read More: Retail in Asia
