the Persuasion Advantages of a Hyphenated Name
12th March 2010
I have a big last name. “Booth-Butterfield.” And that hyphen. Okay, mock me. I deserve it. The hyphen, however, does have persuasion advantages.
Today, my sweet wife, Melanie Booth-Butterfield, received a personalized gift and fund raising appeal from her beloved Arbor Day Foundation. It gave her free trees, a free book called the Free Tree Book, a free fragrant purple lilac, and a free year of coffee, PLUS an embossed sheet of adhesive mailing labels AND an attractive, personalized Certificate of Appreciation. All presented proudly to:
Melanie B. Butter
What a hoot! I cannot tell you how many times we’ve spotted persuasion plays from various charitable and not so charitable organizations over the years simply because no one gets our names straight. Here are the most common attempts.
Steven B. Butterfield
Booth Butterfield
Steven Boothbutterfie
Stephen Butterworth
Steve Boothbut
Marketers out there harvesting personal contact information obviously have trouble with both the hyphen and the length of the last name. It appears that most simply drop the hyphen then compress the two names into one word, but then the one word contains too many letters for the field width in their database, so we get these weird truncations, mashups, and mistakes.
But, the good news is that we can spot the faux friends immediately. Even with ones as persuasion skilled as this Arbor Day Foundation ambush. All those warm, emotional folks making the world a better place, send us such tender, sweet, and generous notes, letters, and packages and, gee, they even let us, if we’d like, write a check. How about it,
D.R. Boothbutt
What’s most interesting to me is that for-profit companies almost never make this error. They almost always get it right and never let the mistake stand. Our good close personal friends who are saving the world somehow don’t see my name and its correct spelling as that important, I guess. And really, what’s in a name?
As long as the check clears.