Quality response sharpens survey insights

This year's CEI Asia Pacific Annual Industry Survey was our most intensive and extensive research undertaken to date and provides a crucial benchmark for the regional industry. A total of 328 respondents took part in our online survey, which was conducted in October and November 2004 by global researcher giant Synovate. Within this figure, there was a heartening response from corporate buyers, who made up almost 40 per cent of the total survey participants. Hard data Information from these key business decision-makers often proves elusive and buyers, especially those in Asia, are notoriously reticent about revealing their budgets or their future plans. What is even more encouraging is that so many of the buyers came from key functions within their corporations, with exactly one third describing themselves as belonging to top or senior management. This year's survey, therefore, marks a new stage in measuring and forecasting the region's CEI industry, a marketplace that has often been difficult to profile and pin down. Synovate's data-collection methods also allowed us to profile our corporate respondents in much greater detail than before. We were able to break down by origin of market as well as by industry sectors. The most responsive markets for buyers proved to be Hong Kong, with buyers representing 50 per cent of all respondents from the territory, Australia and New Zealand followed with a buyer response of just over 48 per cent, and Singapore, with 44 per cent of respondents from the Lion City identifying themselves as buyers. This tends to confirm the position of these three marketplaces as the most sophisticated areas of buyer activity and also, thankfully, the most open. When the corporate buyer sector is broken down into areas business activity, there are some revealing statistics on the most active industries involved in CEI activities across Asia Pacific. Industrial and manufacturing accounts for the single largest buyer segment, 13.28 per cent. Not far behind comes the financial services and banking sector at 12.5 per cent. Joint third is the IT/Telecoms industries with 10.94 per cent and advertising/marketing and PR agencies. Perhaps surprisingly, the pharmaceutical sector accounts for just over 3 per cent of buyer respondents and the automotive industry for less than 1 per cent. As far as the kind of events buyer respondents of the annual survey are organising, the figures show the sheer variety of corporate CEI activities. Meetings and conferences were organised by almost 76 and 70 per cent respectively and over half organised exhibitions of one kind or another. Almost one-third reported that they are involved in planning and buying incentive programmes. However, aside from these staple CEI sectors, our respondents are also heavily involved in business events that push brand profiles and build corporate morale. Around 60 per cent organise inner-company team-building and staff training, while on the brand side, 45 percent are involved in product launches and over a third in varying kinds of live events and roadshows. When it comes to involvement in industry bodies, just over half of the survey's respondents were members of CEI professional associations. Membership dues Close to one-third were members of various local or national associations. Of the international bodies, our survey partner PATA (Pacific Asia Travel Association) claimed the allegiance of nearly one quarter of respondents. From the incentive sector, just over 5 per cent are members of the Society of Incentive Travel Executives (SITE). International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) members account for the same number of respondents, while UFI (the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry) members registered 3.66 per cent, tying with the Asia Pacific Exhibition and Convention Council. Members of the International Association for Exhibition Management totalled 2.44 per cent of respondents. This year's survey has made significant strides in boosting the buyer element overall and afforded us a revealing snapshot of who and where those buyers are and how their budgets are being spent. Together this presents a qualitative advance on our understanding of how key decision-makers shape the regional CEI market.