Jan Li Po-yi, marketing and promotions officer, retail marketing and promotions department, Tuen Mun Town Plaza
I joined Sino Group as a management trainee shortly after I graduated from a local university in 2005. In my first year with the company I was given the chance to rotate from one department to another. Towards the end of the training programme I decided to stay in the retail marketing and promotions department of Tuen Mun Town Plaza as a marketing officer.
Tuen Mun Town Plaza is a huge shopping mall, so there are events going on constantly throughout the year. Occasionally, there is more than one event happening on the same day.
My department has a few teams that are responsible for their respective shopping malls. Because we rarely outsource to a marketing communications company for help, we do our own thinking to devise events and see them through from idea development to full implementation.
We begin by brainstorming and are encouraged to throw out ideas relating to the latest trends and anything that is currently popular, especially something that younger shoppers are interested in.
To help broaden the scope of our creative ideas, my department conducts regular market research with target groups to find out what these people want and what would motivate them to spend when in a shopping mall. The results definitely help us to conceive an event that would be popular.
Occasionally, we take our ideas from events that have happened outside Hong Kong. We can adapt these ideas to suit local tastes. For example, we held an ice cream festival last summer and the concept was derived from a similar event in Japan.