For the past few
decades, Culture and Creative industries have been promoted actively in China,
UK, US and Australia with many successful cases in terms of innovation and
profits of business management. Among the business concepts, although many
companies have made use of brand development strategies and innovative
operations in adding-values to their products and services for building up
their reputation; however, little academic research have been conducted how to
draw the interests and awareness of university students on the cultural and
creative products in this emerging industry.
There are several problems associated with these:
1. The definitions and scopes of the industry are very
broad, which vary from place to place depending on their government policies,
their own resources, economic and social development.
2. The curriculum of cultural, creative industry being
offered is very broad and newly developed, so there is room for more
integration of the existing theories in an applicable manner.
With the promotion from the government, industry and
educational organizations for the “Culture and Creative Industries” nowadays
(see Fig. 1), human inputs are important to provide stable resources for the
growth of the emerging industries. Thus there is a need to enhance or
strengthen the students’ brand interests and awareness of Brand Identity System
to meet increasing competition for local and global needs of the Creative
Industries. In order to put the issue in focus and to fill up these gaps, the
research will investigate the integration of “Brand Identity System” Theory by
David Aaker (1996) (see Fig. 2) and “Creative Value Chain Theory” by UNESCO
(2009) (see Fig. 3) for more in-depth understanding of how to apply the
theories during brand promotion. Regarding methodology, quantitative data was
collected through questionnaires with 12 questions, using mainly closed-ended
questions of 5 Likert scale, 1 ranking question (ordinal data) and a few
demographic questions (for nominal data). The feedbacks collected are 119
respondents (China- Zhuhai), 113 respondents (Macau SAR), 111 respondents
(Australia), 111 respondents (UK), 15 respondents (US), 5 HK SAR respondents
respectively. The significant values of the study will be two-folds. Firstly,
in general, it will increase the understanding of integrating the 2 theories
together in culture and creative industries. Secondly, in specific, it will
provide insight about the effect of brand development and their awareness in
relation to the five stages of creative value chain in culture and creative
industries
