This post, despite what the title may suggest, is not about getting to intimately know your customers – although that is good advice – instead I am putting on my pseudo psychologist hat on and taking a look into a person’s connection to their name and how you can use it to drive sales for your business.
As American author and speaker, Dale Carnegie put it in his self-help classic How To Win Friends And Influence People, “Remember that a person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language”.
You may remember Coca-Cola’s share a coke campaign which saw them label bottles and cans of coke with many common names. The campaign blew up and remains one of the best campaigns in the company’s 125+ years in business.
The campaign sparked an influx of consumer created content. These consumers were not paid influencers. In fact the majority probably never really considered that they were promoting Coke. To the consumer they were just sharing the joy of finding their name emblazoned on the side of a bottle of coke.
If anything finding a coke with your name on just confirms that your name is actually relatively common but this was not what the consumer saw. They saw something weirdly intimate and personal instead. A multinational marketing campaign from a century old corporate giant and a deep personal connection seem incongruent but all it took was a couple hundred names on the side of their product to drive consumers to collectively share hundreds of thousands of photos with the product and the campaign’s hashtag, “#shareacoke”.
So what can we learn from this? A coke is just a coke until you put someone’s name on it. Then it becomes their coke –and that is share worthy.
Similarly there is no personal touch in giving someone a regular coke, but giving them a coke with their name on it shifts the dynamic from being about the coke to being almost exclusively about the recipient.
At this point you are probably thinking “yes, it was a great campaign but you are overthinking it. People don’t care about their name that much”.
Except they do.
From donating masses of money to have a college block or library named after you, naming your company after yourself to put your name in lights or on a glistening sign dawning a skyscraper down to buying a novelty keychain with your name on (or being disappointed that there was no keychain with your name) we have an inherent value placed upon our own names.
Brow University named after benefactors John Brown and Nichols Brown Jr.
The idea of tapping into someone’s name to create a connection isn’t unique to Coca-Cola, there are many other examples. A classic example of this is Starbucks but every company that ever allowed you to add a personal touch with your name or even your initials has tapped into it in some capacity.
How do you leverage this for your business? Find a way to personalise your product with your customer’s name. If you cannot customise the product itself can you include a thank you for your purchase letter which addresses the user by name?
Let us know how you are using the power of your consumers name on Twitter @Online_Influx . (twitter.com/Online_Influx)
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