There are hundreds of ways to celebrate it. Flowers, chocolates, gifts, breakfast in bed, Sunday dinner out or a meal cooked by someone other than you. If you’re a Mom then you can guess what I’m talking about. The one day of the year it’s all about us.

As my son grows older and has his own source of income the gifts get better. However, I was telling him the other day after the inevitable “so what do you want for Mother’s day question” about some of the great gifts he made of macaroni and clay. His response… “Who thought of this holiday anyway?”  My interest peaked, I decided to find out. Not surprisingly, we women had to create it ourselves.

According to Mother’s Day Central:

Only recently dubbed “Mother’s Day,” the highly traditional practice of honoring of Motherhood is rooted in antiquity, and past rites typically had strong symbolic and spiritual overtones; societies tended to celebrate Goddesses and symbols rather than actual Mothers. In fact, the personal, human touch to Mother’s Day is a relatively new phenomenon. The maternal objects of adoration ranged from mythological female deities to the Christian Church itself. Only in the past few centuries did celebrations of Motherhood develop a decidedly human focus.

The Early Egyptians celebrated the Goddess Isis, commonly known as the Mother of the Pharos. Historical Greeks celebrated the Goddess Rhea, known as the Mother of most of the Deities including Zeus. Early Europeans translated this celebration into honoring the Mother Church during the Lenten season. Later they expanded it to include real mothers, specifically the lower class.

Early Americans discontinued European traditions when they came to America, but reinvented a similar version decades later.  Motherhood Central says;

The first North American Mother’s Day was conceptualized with Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation in 1870. Despite having penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic 12 years earlier, Howe had become so distraught by the death and carnage of the Civil War that she called on Mother’s to come together and protest what she saw as the futility of their Sons killing the Sons of other Mothers. With the following, she called for an international Mother’s Day celebrating peace and motherhood.

Courtesy of Mother's Day Central

Mother’s Day was originally celebrated on June 2 with a handful of women’s groups funded by Ms. Howe. It lasted only as long as Ms. How was paying. After she died, so did the holiday. Years later Anna Reeves Jarvis and after he death  her daughter,  Anna M. Jarvis carried on the tradition and in West Virginia celebrated the first Mother’s Day in 1908. Ms. Jarvis spent years petitioning for national recognition of the holiday. In 1912, West Virginia was the first state to officially recognize the day and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed into national law the second Sunday in May as what we now know as Mother’s Day.

Ironically, the very woman who fought tirelessly for recognition of Mother’s Day spent the later years of her life fighting against the commercialization of it; flower sales specifically. She died blind, poor and childless. What she did not know was that they very flower industry she was fighting anonymously paid for her care until her death.

So what does this have to do with practice marketing?  Not much, I guess. However, I do think it’s always important to know why we do what we do. I wasn’t sure why I ordered flowers online the other day and sent them to the Mothers in my life.  Good marketers capitalize on this and make touchy feely commercials, advertisements and billboards coaxing me to buy whatever they’re selling. Whether you’re selling or buying humans always have motivating factors—even if they don’t even know where they came from. If you know them or the history behind them, you’re a step ahead and can sell from a position of power.

In our 2010 Practice Marketing Workshop, we spend a lot of time figuring out how attorneys buy and why.

If you’re interested in learning to leverage this knowledge in your practice, sign up for our Practice Marketing Workshop at http://www.lncpracticebuilder.com/workshop/index.html

Tags: image marketing, marketing workshops, Mothers Day, realizing your dreams, why people buy, workshops

This entry was posted on May 9, 2010 at 1:38 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Holiday Inspiration Inspiration Motivation by lncprac No Comments Yet