Evaluation of information technology application in retail marketing in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong is renowned for its name of shopping paradise in the past several decades. It not only has the attractive street markets, but also has the different styles, themes and levels of shopping malls. Indeed, the retail industry of Hong Kong serves both visitors and Hong Kong local people as well. From the figures of Hong Kong Retail Management Association, it recorded HK$494,456 million dollars overall retail sale in 2013 and 267,703 person were employed as the workforce under retail as at December 2013. In the past two decades, many large, trendy and featured shopping malls were built, and they were mostly developed and owned by the major developers as a long term investment for rental return. However, as Hong Kong is just a small city, thus this leads to keener competitions between the shopping malls in order to attract shoppers to increase the turnover of the shop tenants inside, thus the rental receivables to the developers in turn. In order to attract more shoppers, other than the asset enhancements, improvements and renovation projects carried out by the shopping malls within a short period of time to have a fresh feeling to the shoppers and improve the deficiencies of the malls, many new and innovative marketing activities were carried out by them as well, such as placing 100 number of full height Doraemom mascots (a famous Japanese cartoon character) outside the shopping mall, arranging a 20 meter height inflatable Holland designer rubber duck to be display on the sea outside the shopping mall, organizing overnight cheering up activities for the student at the eve of the announcement of public exam, providing overnight live broadcasting of World Cup, etc. Besides the above, many information technologies were incorporation in the shopping malls nowadays so as to provide a convenience, better feelings and involvement to the shoppers. Other than retail, telecommunications in Hong Kong is also the leading edge in the world. The mobile penetration rate is 238.6 percent by February 2014, that means every Hong Kong people has over two mobile phones; in which, around 72% is using 3G/4G, it means around two-third of mobile subscribers are using smartphones. For the marketing of the shopping malls, they also provide many information technology applications in order to attract the shoppers. For example, sophisticated webpage design, mobile apps, Facebook, Weibo, Twitter, Instagram, were made for their shopping mall. In this paper, we will evaluate of using such information technology applications in the retail marketing under the context of shopping malls in Hong Kong.