Love vs. Fear

Went to practice Hot Fusion Yoga at Core Power Yoga the other day and the instructor said these words to set the tone and focus of our session:

There are two basic emotions - love and fear. When you love, you have no fear. If you fear, you can't love. You can choose to open yourself up to love and close your fear.

"Fear knocks at the door. Love answers. But nobody was there."

Fast Learning

I know that I haven't been updating my blog on a weekly basis as I planned to. You would think that after grad-school is done, I'd have more time to blog away. Somehow, I find myself in a predicament... Although I don't have any readings or research to do for class, I have a lot of stuff that I'd like to re-read and learn about. The more I read, the more stuff I want to know. The more stuff I know that I don't know and need to learn about, the more readings I want to do. Does that make sense?

Great reads from blogs like Hubspot, Seth Godin, and Marketing Sherpa are piling up in my list of unread e-mails. And then, there are websites like Campaign Asia and TedTalks that have tons of content that I'd like to dive into.

If only there's a way to learn fast like The Matrix movie scene below. That would be super!

P.R.oblem of the Week

Seems like this week is dedicated to big brands in big trouble for racial discrimination.

First up:  Hollister models made fun of Asian customers at their grand opening in South Korea. Lee Hyung-Ju described the offensive actions on the English Korean news site koreaBANG: "Images of models making 'squinty eyes' faces, flipping their middle finger to photographers, and mocking Asian pronunciation of English appeared on their Twitter accounts."

Next up: Hooters in Queens is sued by a Korean-American diner after an employee wrote "Chinx" on the check as the name of the customer, the New York Times reported.

I think these two incidents serve as reminders to HR and Marketing departments to make sure they train/brief the employees on cultural sensitivity. Racist jokes like these hurt the company's image and bottom line.

KoreaBANG wrote: "Major Korean newspapers covered the scandal, as online comments called for a boycott and promised to return clothing they had bought. Other netizens have tracked down the models’ personal details and published them online." Tsk, tsk, tsk. Hollister had just landed in a new market and already talks of boycotting the brand for racial insults? Not good. Talk about biting the hand that is about to feed you! Where's the Chief Culture Officer?