Advertising and brand agency Landor & Fitch believes Southeast Asia has been a promising growth market, especially in Singapore. The agency designed Microsoft’s immersive high-tech Asia Pacific base in the country. It also launched the design of the first 5G-powered, 24/7 unstaffed store for the major telco group Singtel.
These milestones became possible with its powerhouse cast of creative minds headed by its managing director of Asia-Pacific growth, Janice Siu.
She was based in Hong Kong as Landor’s former executive director of Greater China and Fitch’s business director from 2017 to 2020 before moving to Singapore.
According to the company, Siu’s leadership in Singapore would form part of Landor & Fitch’s broader strategy as it boosts its team in APAC with brilliant and transformative leaders in target markets.
Before the regional successes and new key accounts, the agency was originally two separate entities. The merger of global brand consulting and design agency Landor, and experience and retail design consultancy, Fitch, formed Landor & Fitch.
The integration proffers more diversified and combined strategies, expressions, experiences, cultural transformations, management, and performances for any brand. Siu gathers her people with this vision in tow while veering away from conformity to more innovative branding.
Read about this and more, starting from the first of this four-part interview series.
Brand evolution: Shifting from the traditional
COS Asia: How have you evolved as a global marketing and design group? What must organisations do to avoid falling behind the curve?
Siu: We move from traditional marketing to a more focused approach to the client and talents as our overarching marketing strategy.
Employee branding is our marketing focus. It’s how we recruit the right talent. People are our brand, our best marketing tool. We must make them shine — the best way to retain and attract talent.
COS Asia: How fast is the Creative Industry growing in Asia? How can your company keep up?
Siu: Based on different sources, the Creative Industry may gain 40% growth by 2030 and add eight million jobs across nine economies. I can feel the growth momentum already at work.
If I’d base this growth momentum on our business performance, we have experienced the best two years of growth in the past decade.
We keep up with rapid change by focusing on people, clients, and creativity.
COS Asia: What are the biggest challenges the industry faces? How do you address them?
Siu: Talent attraction, development, and retention are always the main challenges. We have a solid talent retention strategy based on our business and culture by building an employer brand as our key non-negotiable scheme.
We also change the role and attitude of the leadership team by being empathetic toward employees and rewarding and supporting them.
Lastly, we map out the future of work footprint critical to our success as the world changes.
This feature was extracted from Chief of Staff Asia’s exclusive interview with Janice Siu, Managing Director for Asia Pacific Growth at Landor & Fitch. For further coverage please see the below link:
