I was at a basketball game for my alma mater the other night when a chipmunk mascot, complete with cape and wizard hat, and his entourage took to the court during a timeout. This magic chipmunk was the marketing rep for a chain of Dallas-area dentist offices for that night. I’ll let you re-read that last sentence to let the sheer insanity of it sink in. I don’t even know where to start with what’s wrong with that sentence.

Somebody, at some point, sat down to figure out how to market a chain of dentist offices. And their answer was, “Let’s put somebody in a chipmunk suit. No, a magical chipmunk suit. And then lets have them run around the arena at a basketball game.” Never-mind that it’s hard for me to take a CHAIN of dentist offices (as a concept) seriously, you’re expecting this magical chipmunk to persuade me to use said chain of dentist offices? Mascots, as a rule, can’t even talk!

But that’s not the point. The point is that there is a disconnect in marketing where we decide on a marketing tactic without think about what the marketing tactic itself says about our business. If you’re going to ask me to sit in a chair and let you poke me in the gums with sharp metal objects for an hour, you better not represent yourself with a magical mascot.

What Can Even an Abandoned Blog Say About You?

On the other side of that coin, a few weeks ago, I was looking for a trustworthy place to take my car in for some work. The car repair business is littered with shops that are interested in getting the most money out of you, not helping you. So I was going to do my due diligence in research. I came across one shop (count them, one!) that had even made an effort to look like they’re interested in actually helping their customers. This effort included a relatively abandoned blog, irregularly updated social media, and addressing their one poor review directly on a business review site.

The very fact that this repair shop even attempted to have a blog and social media presence devoted to actually helping customers spoke volumes about them in comparison to the other shops around town. So it goes back to this: before you even think about your message, what does the marketing tactic that you’ve chosen say about your business? And since this is a blog about blogs, what does having a blog say about your business to your customer?