The other day, a black Ford pickup truck with a Mary Kay decal drove ahead of us along Clairemont Avenue. We were returning to the farmhouse Airbnb we rented for the week while our whole family was back where I grew up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Eric noticed it first.
Mary Kay is still a thing?
he wondered.
I guess so.
I wonder-said back.
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Remember when you wanted to work for them?
I laughed at the memory. I had not thought about this career interest in quite some time.
It was true. Shortly after developing a litany of stereotypical early career choices (veterinarian, doctor, astronaut), I settled on “highest earning salesperson (woman? — I haven’t looked into MK’s gender policies) for Mary Kay cosmetics.”
If you know me, you’re probably laughing out loud at the absurdity of this aspiration coming from yours truly.
When you’re young, people always say cliches like: ‘You can be anything you want if only you put your mind to it!’ ‘If you dream it, you can be it!’ Pep talks notwithstanding, and with what feels like total hindsight, even though I hope I have plenty of good career years yet to come, I am doubtful this would — or could — have panned out for me.
My Mary Kay aspirations centered on a singular goal: earn a pearl-pink Cadillac. As I understood it, the top earning salesperson each year got to drive this special Cadillac. I wanted to be that person.
The fact that this motivated me is mind boggling in All.The.Ways. I know next-to-nothing about cars and have no idea if a Cadillac is a good make (model?! I literally almost wrote “model” but corrected myself. Make.). I own no cosmetics unless you count lip gloss (though if I’m being honest, my increasing wrinkles which my 4-year old points out to me by asking — too regularly — “Why do you have cracks in your forehead?” are making me reconsider…). And I spend a good deal of my time exploring paths for intrinsic motivation, especially for learners. A cheesy vehicle is a star-chart prize extrinsic motivator rivaling all the stickers or stuffies or ice cream with two scoops of sprinkles in the world.
Star Charts
Thinking back on my drive (pun intended!) to sell beauty products in pursuit of this illustrious – and elusive - pink car, I am wondering about where that obsession came from. And about the car’s efficacy in the larger Mary Kay enterprise. Do women (people?) actually do a better job and work harder at pedaling cosmetics because of the possibility and status of a pink Cadillac? Do consumers feel more compelled to buy Mary Kay products because of it (and their branding more broadly)?
Few would disagree: marketing matters. People in industries with which I am not well versed say things like “image is everything” and “your product is your brand.”
The pink Cadillac’s endurance over 5 decades points to its efficacy. From the Mary Kay website about the “Career Car Program,” I learned:
“Since the Mary Kay Career Car Program’s inception in 1969, more than 171,000 independent sales force members have qualified or re-qualified to earn the use of a Mary Kay Career Car. There are currently over 3,600 Career Cars on the road nationwide, including over 1,000 Pink Cadillacs.”
The staggering number of people who have qualified or re-qualified for use of this car might lead you to believe the program is just handing out cars in a you-get-a-car-and-you-get-a-car way reminiscent of the Oprah show from days of yore. To the contrary, though, these 171,000 people who have qualified during 55 years of the Career Car program represent less than 1.5% of the top 10% of sales force members; the big number of cars points instead to the massive size and scale of the Mary Kay salesforce, which in 2021 included more than 2.4 million beauty consultants. Holy schmoly!
Despite Eric and my inquiry about its existence, it seems the Mary Kay company is still alive and well, way beyond the decals.
Pink Cadillacs and Pokémon
Ok. At this point, you’re wondering what a cosmetic company and my bizarre early career goals have to do with nature-based learning. I feel you. But all the things in my brain are connected because they are all in MY brain — and therefore inherently linked — so there’s a throughline here.
I’m wondering: what’s the pink Cadillac equivalent for someone who successfully spreads nature-based learning? What should (will?) the decals say? What’s our brand?
My brother once made a snarky comment (more than once… lol…but this one struck me as particularly compelling) that has really stuck with me for over a decade: “Pokémon Go,” he claimed, “has helped WAY more kids be active than Michele Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign.” TBH, I’m not at all interested in exploring the validity of that claim (though he’s not the only one who has made this assertion). I’m even less interested in unpacking the libertarianism at its roots. In my wistful pink Cadillac moment, I’m thinking about the nugget(s?) of wisdom in there.
Should “we” (you and I and the peeps who want to mainstream nature-based learning or some form of nature connections in schools) lean into the allure?
And if we don’t, if we are too puritanical in our approach, will we miss the forest for the trees? And then miss the trees themselves? And then compromise the very viability of nature connections for all?
Inefficacy here has massive ethical consequences. The stakes are bananas high.
If we are too understated
If we spend too much time ‘evidence suggest-ing’ and ‘correlation-is-not-causation-ing’ and worrying
If we don’t talk LOUDLY enough or use JAZZ HANDS 🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌 enough
If we downplay the gravity of this work
If we crouch behind caveats
If we don’t find our very own pink Cadillac
We risk everything.
❤️B
Waah! To me pink cadillac was a song way back in 1987 we loved dancing and woody buggies.having meeting in the nature around us and exchange programmes on new ideas of preserving , improvise and using nature as a second option in daily learning