IT'S PERSONAL

When I was a kid, I never got the pencil or cup with my name printed on it. There were times when I wished my name was something more common like Mike or Kevin or Doug so I could find my name on things. But I had a less common name with an even less common spelling, so I was out of luck. Of course, there are advantages to having a less common name, so I outgrew my pencil and cup envy. 

Or I thought I had until I went to buy a Coke the other day. Coke is doing this thing where they've put names on bottles - the most popular 250 names "among teens and millennials" apparently. I'm not a teen or a millennial, so I guess I'm not exactly the target market. But my name did not make the list. I know this because Coke offers a handy tool where I can enter my name and have it officially confirmed that it is not popular enough. The online tool does offer the reassurance that "on the upside, you must have a really unique name." And I can create a "virtual bottle" to compensate for my uniqueness. But I can't drink a virtual Coke. 

Which brings me to the problem with Coke's hyper-personalization experiment: when I went to the store to buy a real bottle of Coke I almost didn't buy one because I didn't want a bottle with somebody else's name on it. It just would have been weird to be walking down the street drinking a Coke apparently meant for Alejandro or Lisa or someone else who isn't me.

Personalization is a powerful engagement tool. It plays nicely to our innate vanity, except when it inadvertently does the opposite. Personalization by its very nature also excludes. Saying something is for somebody else by literally putting their name on the label also says it's not for me. Sometimes this is okay. Sometimes your thing isn't for everyone and the value gained by making someone feel special is worth the cost of someone else feeling left out. I assume Coke calculated this risk in planning the name promotion, as should anyone thinking about personalizing their engagement efforts because it's a delicate balance.

It's entirely possible I'm the only Coke drinker bothered by this. But consider this final point: I did end up buying a bottle, but only because I managed to find one that had the name I was looking for on the label: Coke.