Sometimes the little things lead to something big.
There have been a number of times when a particular item – a photo, painting, song, film, etc. – when a particular creative piece has influenced an idea of mine.
We’re currently shooting a series of photos for Club Car, the idea for which came from a painting I’ve carried around in a virtual satchel for decades, ever since my college years, actually.
We believe Club Car delivers more than transportation for the golf course. We like to think of the company as the most valuable resource with which a golf operation can do business. By helping a course owner increase revenues, reduce expenses, manage assets and deliver great golf experiences, Club Car can have a positive impact on a course’s bottom line.
For years our creative imagery for the Club Car brand has focused on one thing, “comfort,” for instance, and we may use take a photo that shows how easily golfers enter and exit the car. Then we would rely on additional images or on copy or a full campaign of executions to expand the story. But this year this one image kept coming into mind, an image I think about often, one I open either literally or in my mind’s eye whenever I try to think about something with a larger perspective.
We were looking for an idea communicating a broader view, a panoramic look at a golf landscape that might show Club Car at work virtually everywhere on the course.
The image above, of course, is “The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, a 16th Century Flemish artist. I was introduced to the painting in an undergraduate course on modern poetry, specifically W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” where Brueghel’s canvas serves the almost arcane purpose of demonstrating that life does indeed go on, “everything turn[ing] away quite leisurely” from what may be what history or legend deems the most important thing. In Brueghel’s great landscape, there in the lower right hand corner is the end of the legendary fall of Icarus, the prisoner who escaped with wings made with wax … that melted when he flew too close to the sun. The legend falls, yet the farmer plows, the shepherd peers at the sky the sailors sail – life goes on apace.
That’s not what the Club Car story is about, obviously, but Auden’s poem and its reference to Brueghel’s painting have stuck with me for more than 35 years, and I’ve often used them as references to help explain this thought or that idea.
Such is the case this week as our team is in south Florida shooting a broad, panoramic landscape that will demonstrate that Club Car is at work here, here and there, throughout a golf operation, providing business solutions that go far beyond what many think of as merely “two golfers, two seats and two bags.”
These are the creative references we carry with us. Who would have dreamed that Brueghel and Auden might inspire a golf operation to be more profitable?
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