What's in a name? Brands copy each other to personalise customer experience

When does copycat marketing become annoying and cliched? When Nutella decided to personalise all their products in the same way that Coca Cola had already done so. Couldn't Nutella have come up with anything else? They just looked around at what other FMCG brands had done and said "yep let's copy them" and hope no one notices. Aren't marketers supposed to be original?

The entire Nutella campaign is virtually identical to that of Coca Cola. Get people to personalise the product with their name through social media, websites and events. Everyone feels good because their name appears on a Nutella just like it appeared on a Coke bottle or can. Except it doesn't. Nutella did the campaign in a much more muted and less creative way.

People just went to a website and were sent a label, Nutella weren't actually selling the named products in supermarkets like Coke were. They also didn't have the wit of Coke who went into nicknames like Bro, Hubby and Wifey as well as using country names like Singapore.

Ironically this now appears on the Nutella website....they now can't do the thing they have been promoting that they can...! Really is it that hard to print out a label and mail it to a customer? Isn't this now the opposite of a great customer experience? Who happens to have labels the right size that they can print out themselves? Is this now a truly DIY promotion?

Surely defeats the purpose of the campaign?

They also had to cope with some satirical labels...

The whole strategy of replacing a brand logo is called de-branding and has been practiced by many brands such as Nike who replaced their name with the famous swoosh. However they didn't go as far as to personalise trainers with people's names which would have been odd.

Coke's de-branding campaign is the best use of personalisation and the way they engaged was a fantastic way of marketing the product in a personal way. Not only did they allow people to create their own named cans via events and on line they also sold the most popular and most generic names in stores too.

They also had some backlash with consumers rebranding in ways that Coca Cola wouldn't like...

But they weren't the first to personalise products. Louis Vuitton have been doing it for years. This added emotional connection between you and the brand is supposed to make you more loyal to that product...except studies have shown that very little marketing actually does that.

There is a great article in the Financial Times recently about how loyalty doesn't exist and brands like Coke make all their extra sales through persuading Pepsi drinkers to buy their product 1-2 times a year not by increasing loyal consumers buying behaviour. 

Then of course there is Starbucks. Since 2005 Starbucks told their Baristars to write the name of their customers on their order.  They also ran campaigns replacing the name Starbucks with the Starbucks symbol and no name. The idea was then to insert the name of the customer in a personal, touchy feely kind of way.  

However Starbucks are notorious for personalising their cups with your name wrongly spelt.

There are even joke websites set up for you to see how a Starbucks barista will misspell your name. There are also many videos and even entire satirical series on YouTube dedicated to the misspelling of your name....very funny. Probably not envisaged by Starbucks before they started this and now they can't go back on it!