Regional perception poll on the ASEAN creative economy
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Policymakers in Seoul — and in Singapore, Jakarta, and Manila — have been talking about the ASEAN creative economy for years. They have produced strategic plans, funded festival programmes, and built intergovernmental frameworks around it. What they have had far less of is systematic evidence about how the people living inside that creative economy actually understand it.
That gap has now been partially closed. In October 2025, the British Council released the first-ever Regional Perception Poll on the ASEAN Creative Economy — a survey of 4,117 respondents across all ten ASEAN member states and Timor-Leste, covering both the general public and active creative economy participants ("Creative Players"). Commissioned by the UK Mission to ASEAN, the British Council, and the ASEAN Secretariat with support from the Senior Officials Responsible for Culture and Arts (SOMCA), the poll was developed under the ASEAN-UK Advancing Creative Economy programme and conducted by research team iDNA Solutions with contributors across the region.
The Paradox of Familiarity and Growth
The most structurally interesting finding is a paradox that runs through the entire report: a significant majority of ASEAN publics believe the creative economy is growing, while a near-majority have limited familiarity with what the creative economy actually is.
The numbers: 60% of general public respondents say the creative economy in the region is experiencing significant growth. Yet only 47% describe themselves as "somewhat familiar" with the term "creative economy" itself. Roughly four in ten ASEAN citizens believe in the growth of something they cannot fully define.
This is not necessarily a contradiction. It may instead reflect the gap between lived experience and conceptual vocabulary. Many Southeast Asians consume K-dramas, attend local music festivals, buy craft products, and follow independent designers on social media without organising these activities under the label "creative economy." The sector is present in their lives; the policy framework that names it is not. The British Council report frames this as "a lack of promotion regarding the creative economy, which can lead to insufficient information" — but the implication may be more pointed: that the creative economy, as a concept, currently circulates primarily among policymakers, industry associations, and academics rather than among the publics it ostensibly serves.
For institutions that design ASEAN creative economy programmes, this should prompt a recalibration. If only half your target population knows what you're talking about, naming your programme "Supporting the Creative Economy" is not a communication strategy; it is a form of professional shorthand that mistakes sector vocabulary for public understanding.
What Creative Professionals Actually Struggle With
The poll distinguished between the general public and Creative Players — individuals working within creative enterprises, associations, government agencies, and academic institutions. The Creative Player findings are, in some respects, more sobering than the public data.
Asked about the primary challenge facing the creative economy at the regional level, 50% of Creative Players identified lack of regional coordination and cooperation as the single biggest obstacle. This is a striking number. It means that, among the professionals who actually work within ASEAN's creative sectors, the most significant barrier they perceive is not funding, not skills, not infrastructure — it is the fragmentation of the regional support ecosystem itself.
The financing picture reinforces this. 25% of Creative Players cited limited access to financing as the primary barrier to reaching domestic and international markets, while 68% report struggling to access markets overall. The financing constraint is not unique to ASEAN — it is a structural challenge in creative industries globally — but the market access figure is particularly high. It suggests that even where creative professionals can produce work, the pathways to reaching audiences, especially cross-border, are not functioning well.
High costs run through both the general public and professional data. 53% of general public respondents name high cost as the primary barrier to consuming ASEAN creative products and services — a finding that points not only to pricing but to production costs, distribution inefficiencies, and the structural economics of cultural goods in markets with significant income variation. Notably, the report finds that Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines manage to partially overcome this barrier through strong demand for locally-rooted, culturally distinctive work — which suggests that authenticity and local cultural resonance may function as effective price anchors in ways that generic regional programming does not.
The IP Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
One of the less-discussed findings in the report concerns intellectual property. Seven of the eleven surveyed countries — Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand — expressed a "neutral stance" on IP support, including registration, valuation, commercialisation, and legal services. This neutrality is significant. In creative industries, IP is the mechanism by which cultural production generates sustained economic value. Neutral attitudes towards IP support typically indicate either that existing frameworks are not perceived as relevant or that creative professionals do not yet see IP as central to their professional practice.
The report frames this as an area requiring intervention. Given that the ASEAN Creative Economy Sustainability Framework, adopted by ASEAN Leaders at the 46th Summit in May 2025, includes IP management as a core strategic priority, the distance between official policy ambition and on-the-ground professional attitudes is considerable.
The Value of Being Counted
The poll's most fundamental contribution is simply the act of counting. ASEAN creative economy discourse has long operated on a combination of economic projections, anecdotal cases, and policy aspiration. A systematic, region-wide survey — imperfect as any survey is — anchors that discourse to what people on the ground actually perceive, experience, and struggle with.
The finding that 43% of ASEAN publics believe the creative economy positively affects economic growth and community wellbeing is genuinely encouraging, and so is the finding that 54% see local wisdom and culture as central to creative production. These numbers suggest a reservoir of public support for the sector that policy and industry have not yet fully activated.
But the gaps — in awareness, in market access, in regional coordination, in IP understanding — are the more actionable findings. They describe the actual terrain that ASEAN creative economy programmes, including Korea-ASEAN ones, are operating in. That terrain is more complicated, and more unevenly distributed, than the language of "vibrant creative economy" and "Hallyu-driven ASEAN engagement" typically conveys.
Working with the actual terrain is harder than working with the idealized one. It is also, in the long run, the only thing that works.
The Regional Perception Poll on the ASEAN Creative Economy (British Council, 2025) is available as a free download at britishcouncil.org under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 4.0 licence. The ASEAN Creative Economy Sustainability Framework was adopted at the 46th ASEAN Summit in May 2025.
