We recently caught up with Peter Dixon, Hong Kong-based Executive Creative Director at Prophet, whose career has taken him from engineering and architecture to branding and customer experience.
Earlier in his career, Dixon worked on branding and customer experience projects for global companies including Nissan, McDonald’s, Walmart, Chevron, and Delta Air Lines.
Over the course of our conversation Dixon discusses the experiences that have shaped his thinking, the future of physical retail, why execution remains the defining factor in customer experience, the opportunities AI presents for businesses, and why earning trust often matters more than simply pursuing bold ideas.
Your career spans architecture, design, and brand consulting. How has working across those disciplines shaped the way you think about branding and customer experience?
Growing up, I really wanted to be an astronaut. It was an ambition I held through high school, and as I approached college, began to investigate what type of degree might advance one in getting into that profession. And while I excelled in the humanities in high school, it seemed the best path to being an astronaut would be through engineering. I enrolled in an engineering program at Louisiana State University and eventually graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
While this curriculum was highly technical, it was already teaching me problem-solving skills that, surprisingly, would later be important to me in my current profession.
Having determined that being an astronaut was not as appealing a job possibility because of the required, at the time, military service, I then began my professional career doing offshore construction. The job took me all over the world, to Southeast Asia, India and the Middle East.
While traveling the globe I quite unintentionally began a self-education and interest in art and culture, architecture and design. And after a few years and a lot of thought, I left engineering to eventually study architecture. I got my Masters Degree in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, and moved to New York to be an architect.
After practicing for a few years at some major corporate firms (Swanke Hayden Connell, SOM, Perkins &Will) quite accidentally took a job at a branding firm. I joined Zintzmeyer & Lux, at the time a leading design and branding firm in Europe that counted among its clients BMW, Deutsche Telekom and Lufthansa. It was here I began my journey into brand and design as a process; “a process for making values realizable,” as my first mentor in this business, Jorge Zintzmeyer (the designer of the Swiss currency system) explained what it was we were doing.
It taught me you didn’t need to have the biggest portfolio or the most experience in a category to earn trust. What mattered was coming to the room with a thoughtful approach, good stories and strong chemistry.
At one time, my best friend’s father and my second mentor, Ken Love, was leading a creative redux at the storied branding agency, Lippincott & Margulies (now renamed Lippincott) and he hired me to stand-up an “experiential branding” practice there. And it was here I learned much about the “business” of creative in the service of large enterprises, and was fortunate to – over the next 13 years – build a practice and help cultivate and deliver major rebranding efforts for clients like Chevron, Nissan, McDonald’s, Walmart and Delta Airlines.
In 2008, I was recruited by Prophet to build a design practice and became the first “creative” hire at the firm and over the last 18 years help build a global creative services organization with international clients covering almost all industries and categories, B2C and B2B, and setting up design studios in New York, London, and Hong Kong.
But the project that unlocked everything for me was the rebrand of the Nissan dealership network in 2000. It taught me you didn’t need to have the biggest portfolio or the most experience in a category to earn trust. What mattered was coming to the room with a thoughtful approach, good stories and strong chemistry.
That lesson carried into other transformative projects I later led — from McDonald’s to AB InBev — where my teams and I combined rigorous strategy with bold creativity to deliver impact at scale. That’s where engineering’s analytic problem-solving combined with architecture’s more “synthetic” approach pays off.
For Asian businesses today, I think the same principles apply: lead with insight, build trust through storytelling and design experiences that resonate both locally and globally.
In a recent post, you outlined the idea of treating stores as platforms rather than transaction points. Can you talk more about that and discuss what that shift looks like in practice?
Reimagining stores as platforms means designing them for commerce, curation, connection and culture — not just transactions. The store stops being a point-of-sale and becomes a curated, multi-faceted ecosystem where the retailer acts as the orchestrator, not just the owner. In practice, that can mean inviting third-party brands to “plug in,” rotating pop-ups and collaborations, using staff as human endpoints of data and expertise, and creating more reasons to go and more things to do when you are there.
Reimagining stores as platforms means designing them for commerce, curation, connection and culture — not just transactions.
The transaction becomes the outcome, not the goal. The real shift is from a static store to a dynamic, networked platform that creates discovery, community, and cultural relevance.
Where do you see the biggest disconnect between what brands intend customers to experience and what customers actually experience?
I think most retailers really believe in their intent. But it fails in execution. I’ve seen in Asia a huge difference in execution standards with the West. Maybe you can attribute it to labor costs, but some of it is just attention to details.
You can train product knowledge, but you have to hire for people skills.
The other dimension is most surely the investment in store staff. Whether it’s having enough of them or enabling them with technology or just hiring the right people with a natural lean into customer service. You can train product knowledge, but you have to hire for people skills.
Over the past decade, there has been no shortage of stories about the decline of physical retail. From where you sit today, how do you view that conversation?
I think it’s a moot point. Yes, people love the convenience of e-commerce, and it will continue to get the “easy” money; but consumers love the experience of in-store shopping, the immediacy, the social context, the participation experience. You only have to walk an Asian shopping mall or one of the great department stores – yes, department stores – in this region to see it for yourself. Only bad in-store experiences will be obsolete.
Hong Kong has long served as a bridge between Eastern and Western markets. How has living and working there influenced your approach to branding and customer experience?
I helped integrate Prophet’s Hong Kong studio into our creative platform years ago, and through that experience I’ve seen firsthand how Asian businesses can be both deeply rooted in tradition and remarkably quick to embrace new models of growth. Across the region, there are many examples of ambitious brands turning bold ideas into success stories, even in the face of immense complexity.
But what is strikingly different now is that in my prior visits here, I was the expert bringing our experience from Europe and America; now I’m learning more than I’m teaching, especially about the emerging Asian consumer and the importance of speed to impact. I’m learning quality and innovation mean something different here but are not more important than identity and status. It’s a new ball game.
Across the region, there are many examples of ambitious brands turning bold ideas into success stories, even in the face of immense complexity.
What excites me most is the opportunity to work at this intersection — bringing Prophet’s global approach to uncommon growth while adapting it to the unique pace, creativity and ambition of Asia’s markets.
I’ve also always believed in breaking down silos between strategy and creativity. Hong Kong, sitting at the crossroads of East and West, is the ideal vantage point for that approach. Many clients here are navigating diverse markets, each with its own cultural nuances, while also needing to tell a cohesive global story. Our role is to bring together strategic rigor, creative power, technology and cross-cultural agility to help our clients grow.
AI is reshaping everything from retail operations to customer engagement. What role is AI playing in Prophet’s work today, and where do you see the greatest opportunities for brands?
At Prophet, we view AI as Augmented Intelligence. It is not just a tool for efficiencies, but a multiplier for human ingenuity. The real opportunity lies in designing and delivering integrated AI + human workflows that produce genuine, measurable business growth.
We help leaders bridge the gap by combining deep strategic growth analysis with enterprise technology activation. This is what allows our clients to reimagine their business models and seize new market opportunities faster and far more powerfully. In practice, that means focusing on concrete, defensible outcomes: launching new digital products, modernizing customer acquisition, and building operating models that don’t get bogged down in legacy complexity.
It is not just a tool for efficiencies, but a multiplier for human ingenuity.
We aren’t just advising on this transition from the sidelines — we’ve rebuilt our own firm around it. We integrated our AI platform, MAIA, directly into our daily workflows, and we partner with specialized tech firms to keep ourselves at the forefront. Through our Uncommon Growth Lab, we sit shoulder-to-shoulder with clients to test, learn, and launch AI initiatives quickly. It is about getting real runs on the board, fast.
Do you think clients today are more open to challenging conventional thinking than they were earlier in your career?
No, I don’t think so, at least not more than usual. Clients always talk about challenging the status quo but usually recoil at bold change. It’s just human nature. The role of strategists and creatives is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ideas, bold or not.
What advice would you give brands looking to succeed in Hong Kong today?
With just a year in here, I’m certainly no expert on what makes Hong Kong go. But I think what’s changing everywhere – not just in Hong Kong – is the importance of tapping into what’s culturally relevant; it’s not just about what you are selling, it’s about positioning your product in the cultural flow of what matters in people’s lives.
