Yi-Fang Liu's UBC Blog

Singles Day also known as the “bare sticks holiday”, is an anti-valentine’s day that is on November 11. It has become the new Black Friday and Cyber Monday, as Alibaba is taking this unique holiday into its sales. Alibaba has co-opted the date, by offering deals on its online shopping site; influencing consumers that it is a day for “self-gifting and personal indulgence”. This technique worked, as in 2013 Single Day sales surpassed that of Cyber Mondays, where consumers spend $5.8 billion, which is far more than Black Friday and…read more

Talking about entrepreneur, what is the true definition of it? Mondelez (Internaitonal vide president of global media Bonin Bough) defines entrepreneur as people who see gaps in the market or in other words, “opportunities that nobody saw”, and try to seal the gaps by creating new businesses and make the ‘new ideas’ happen. Before, being an ‘entrepreneur’, according to Amy Cosper, meant having no jobs and trying to make “fast-bucks”, whereas now it means that you are “free” to take upon challenges and think of creative ideas that could make…read more

During class 19, Danielle van Jaarsveld talked about organizational culture and used Zappos as the main example to discuss the importance of creating a ‘happy’ workforce. When we discussed about Zappos’ positive and enthusiastic work environment, I immediately thought of Google’s workplace, which has slides, outdoor activity areas, nap pods, and much more. Google is similar to Zappos as they both have created a positive atmosphere and attitudes to its workforce, which from my perception is a smart way of maintaining efficiency in communication; as seen in Zappos’ organizational culture,…read more