Today is February 29: Leap Day - a day that only comes around every four years to make a critical adjustment to our calendars. What would happen if we didn’t add an extra day to the calendar and we just called this March 1st? That would cause us to be completely out of sync. If we didn’t have a leap day, seasons would shift to different months until, after 753 years, the calendar would be six months opposite of where it is now. Spring would start in September; summer in December; fall in March and winter in June!

To understand leap year, you must understand the history of calendars. The earliest civilizations used a lunar calendar that was based on the phases of the moon. They measured a year as 12 lunar months (from new moon to new moon), or 355 days. But a year is 365 days, so they were off 10 days per year. To make up the difference, lunar calendars added an extra month every few years. For instance, the Hebrew calendar added an extra month called First Adar in years 3, 6, 8, 11, 15, 17 and 19 on a 19-year cycle. Roman emperor Julius Caesar tried to rectify this problem by adopting a calendar that was based on the amount of time it took for the earth to orbit the sun (a.k.a. a solar year). It added one day to February every fourth year – leap day – because it figured a solar year to be 365.25 days (365 days and 6 hours). However, a solar year is actually 365.2425 days (365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds). The calendar we now use is called the Gregorian Calendar. It was deemed necessary because the old Julian Calendar had miscalculated a year by a little more than 11 minutes. As the centuries rolled on, those minutes added up until the 16th century was off by 10 days. To make up the difference, Pope Gregory XIII had 10 days eliminated from the calendar in October 1582 and instituted the calendar we use today. Like the Julian Calendar, it added a leap day in February every four years. However, to make up the extra 18.3 hours that are gained every century by this yearly 11-minute gap, every 100th year is not a leap year, that is except when it is evenly divided by 400. So it goes something like this: in years 1, 2 and 3 there are only 28 days in February. That is also the case with years 100, 200 and 300. However, February 29 is added in year 4 (and those years are divisible by 4, but not the 100, 200 or 300th year). Year 400, and those years evenly divided by 400, is a Super Leap Year.

What does leap day have to do with marketing? Leap Day is about making a correction to keep us accurately measuring out our days. Marketing is also about making a correction in the way you promote your brand. Just as our calendar has to be in sync with our solar orbit, your marketing has to be in sync with the needs and wants of the consumers in your target market. What is the difference between a need and a want? Needs are the very basic services you provide your customers. If there is no need, there are no customers. Wants are what your customers desire beyond your basic service offerings. For instance, they may need a widget and you are a producer of widgets. But they may want it to be tailored to their tastes and delivered to their door in one day. If you can only meet their need, but ignore their wants, you will find that you are out of sync with the customer and are open to losing them to your competition who are marketing their widgets to their wants. Marketing will help you correct this kind of customer retention problem by promoting both the needs and wants.

Back to our Gregorian Calendar for a moment: if you are a math sleuth, you probably realize that our current calendar still leaves us 3 minutes and 19.9 seconds off every 400 years (about ½ second per year). Since we have adopted the Gregorian Calendar, there have only been two 400-year "Super Leap Year” adjustments (1600 and 2000 AD). That means we are off by 6 minutes and 41.8 seconds. It will be a while before we have to take another day off the calendar, but it is slowly coming our way.

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What would happen if we didn’t have leap years?by Amy O’Kruk and Kenneth Uzquiano, CNN.com, February 28, 2024.