Picture yourself as the owner of a beautiful plot of land, ready to provide you with a bountiful harvest. All you have to do is to plant the seeds and nurture the crop.

You till the ground until it is ready for the seed.

You enrich the ground with nutrient-rich manure.

You carefully pick out just the right seed, perfectly suited for the time of year and climate in your state.

You plant the seed, covering it with the rich soil.

You water the seed.

You check the garden the very next day. Nothing has broken ground.

You water again, hoping to see a sprout. You check the garden the following day. Still nothing.

Following the expert advice on the HGTV channel, you lightly water again.

You check the garden again the next day. Nothing.

You figure you did something wrong, so you dig up the seed, two days before it would have broken ground.

Crazy, right? Who would go to all that work and then not give the seed the time it needed to grow?

Look in the mirror. Marketers are guilty of this every day.

One of the core tenets of marketing is accepting the fact that most marketing efforts take longer than you expect or hope they will.

Long after we are sick and tired of an advertising campaign, marketing tactic or tagline, our audience is just beginning to notice it. So in our impatience, we figuratively dig up the seeds too soon.

How many seeds do you think you’ve dug up right before they sprouted?

Drew McLellan is Top Dog at McLellan Marketing Group and blogs at www.drewsmarketingminute.com. He can be reached at Drew@MclellanMarketing.com. © 2010 Drew McLellan