Marketing a new season

So it seems that the groundhog saw his shadow last week and we can expect six more weeks of winter.

This prediction says more about collective boredom than it does about weather prognostication.

Christmas is now a faint memory, and Valentine’s Day is just an excuse to pause and eat chocolate; people are looking for something to occupy themselves until it’s safe to go outside and play. So someone came up with a rodent who predicts weather. Idle people can debate the pros and cons of when spring will come to take away their boredom until it gets here.

It’s all about marketing.

According to Wikipedia, “The American Marketing Association has defined marketing as ‘the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.’"

A snoozing groundhog becomes a process for creating a means for giving people something for which to look forward. The interesting thing about marketing is that people buy into its message, whether it makes sense or not.

For instance: In 1982 in St. Louis a guy named Richard Serra put up slabs of metal, called it a sculpture and the city hired people to cut the grass around it, wash off the graffiti, and call it art; those people call themselves curators of that slab of metal. The same artist has slabs of metal sitting in a scrap yard in New York. They’re called scrap metal.

Marketing.

So how can a groundhog in Pennsylvania predict weather for an entire nation, and even get national news coverage every year? There are similar animals doing the same thing in various places: Staten Island Chuck, General Beauregard Lee in Georgia, Chattanooga Chuck, Jimmy the Groundhog in Wisconsin, Woodstock Willie (Woodstock, Ill.) – even a Canadian groundhog Shubenacadie Sam (Shubenacadie, Alberta). Now you know the Canadian beast isn’t likely to predict an early spring that far north. No one hears about these and others like them — even a couple of groundhogs with female names. Punxsutawney Phil evidently has a better agent.

Punxsutawney Phil has cornered the market on getting a town to host a party in his honor while he sleeps and then sticks his head out of his burrow to see where all the noise is coming from. He meets dignitaries and probably gets fed special groundhog treats. People across the country take seriously whether or not the cranky beast sees his shadow.

Marketing.

Because if you think about it, six weeks or so after Feb. 2 is the first day of spring. Does anyone really need a groundhog to predict the obvious?