Marketing Advice From Mother Nature

In all the years I worked in marketing and Public Relations, no campaign, not even with a huge advertising budget to work with, ever came close to what Mother Nature can put on with a snap of her fingers. By far, I would have to say that the most popular and celebrated of those has to be Autumn. If you asked a dozen people what their favorite season was, I would bet that more than half would agree.

It's not just the colors, spectacular as they are. She gave these colors to the great artistic masters of the world, yet none of them could match what she was able to do with them. The blue of a sunny Autumn sky is a blue that knocks your socks off, so that the visit a few weeks ago from that lovely brown hawk that flew past my window stood out in stark contrast. An Autumn sun glows like no other season's sun and makes the shadows it casts more dramatic. The other day my attention was caught by that favorite sound of Autumn that I constantly rave about, the sound of the geese in motion. This time, however, the sound was unusually loud and when I went to the window, I found that they had changed their normal flight path and were flying directly over my roof! They were low enough for me to get a good look at their beautiful forms, but the most dramatic sight was their shadow, deep and powerful, that flowed over the shingled roof next door like a special effects show! The sights, the sounds, the colors, it all went to make a masterpiece that I doubt even Michelangelo could beat, nor could the best and the brightest on Madison Avenue come up with a more attention-getting, memorable ad.

Whenever I find myself caught up in that distinctly human pursuit of perfection, of being "better-than" the self-created competition born in our own minds, I have only to go outside and look around me. It doesn't take me long to be brought back down to earth and be reminded that the only perfection in the world comes at the hands of Mother Nature, God's Director of Marketing, the one who took all the time in the world to get it right, and is still at work each and every moment. Now that's dedication to a job! Would any of us be as willing to give our lives in the pursuit of our passions? It's certainly something to ponder.

And so it is.