Hyphens and Other Changes

by Lisa Radding lradding@ethnictechnologies.com

It’s not uncommon for a married couple to give their children a hyphenated last name, a combination of their two names. Personally, I’m happy to have just one last name, but I guess I can see the appeal… no favoritism, embracing multiple heritages, uniqueness, etc. In American society, however, while hyphenated names are prevalent, it’s most common for the woman to take the man’s name.

Yesterday a male friend suggested to me that when two people marry, they should just take the better of the two names. Loving the essence of the name, I, of course, have always felt this way. I was surprised to hear it from someone else, particularly a guy. People tend to feel very connected to their names. That’s one reason to hyphenate children’s names and for women to keep their original last names. On the one hand, we feel connected to our names because they are a basic part of our identity. But conversely, they are something our parents bestowed upon us, over which we had no control. Thus, we shouldn’t be offended if someone doesn’t like our name, or if the woman in a marriage has a “better” last name.

Would I give mine up? Sure, but I’d hope his (the future husband I have yet to meet) name is better than mine. There are a lot of considerations at stake in deciding what makes a name better. For example, I like “Radding” because it’s relatively unique. Any Radding is related to me. That’s pretty cool. One point for Radding. But “Radding” is annoying in my signature. It has a lot of “clock-climber letters,” as my third grade teacher called them, which are painstakingly slow to write in cursive. Minus one point for Radding. Regardless of whether or not I give up “Radding” later in life, I’m still connected to the family. I’m not giving up an identity.

Most couples don’t weigh the pros and cons of two names and pick the better one. For those looking to compromise, the most prevalent solution seems to be sticking the two names together, for the kids at least. Yet what happens when Jones-Smith marries Adams-Brown? Should the kids be Jones-Smith-Adams-Brown? Enough is enough. Plus, while it feels fine to adopt a partner’s name when it’s a single name, would I really want to adopt someone else’s hyphenated name? For some reason adopting someone else’s hyphenated name feels more like adopting someone else’s identity than just adopting their single name. It may be one thing to carry around both your own parents’ heritages, but to carry someone else’s? I think not.

Regardless of my feelings about changing last names, the plausibility of them boggles my mind… the infinite number of combinations out there to capture and analyze. But I must say that I haven’t yet come across a Jones-Smith-Adams-Brown, or anyone with more than two names connected by a hyphen.

But is that really a name?

by Lisa Radding lradding@ethnictechnologies.com

Sometimes it is hard to determine when a name is a name. Native American names, for instance, can be misleading to the American eye. But let me assure you that a Mr. Big Horn and a Ms. Flying Earth do exist and that those are their legal names.

About two months ago The Seattle Times published an article about how Facebook deals with these names: it simply shuts down the accounts. You can read the article here:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2009235357_facebook19.html

Facebook faces (no pun intended) an interesting conundrum: How can it keep its integrity as a network if people use fake names? But then, how can it accurately determine which names are fake without extensive research or some (probably labor intensive) proof of identity screening?

I wrote last time about Jonnathan Smmith. Would Facebook consider this a fake name or is it simply an alternate spelling? He wouldn’t be able to prove that it is his name because legally, it isn’t. Yet if you search for the last name “Fingernail” (Native American), at least four people appear who seem to legitimately have this name. I do, however, question the other six results that appear on the first page. What then should Facebook do with a name containing “Fingernail?” We may laugh at the name “Fingernail” but we could also simply consider it an ethnic name. Perhaps we should consider Facebook’s action discrimination against ethnic names. Or perhaps we should consider it an antifraud measure.

Whichever way you view it, it strikes me how easily an ethnic name can be misunderstood. It’s my job to understand them correctly, in the abstract, unconnected to a person. That way, if someone uses the name “Fingernail” or “Smmith,” for example, we can understand the names and the people as Native American or English (baring Enhanced Neighborhood Analytics) respectively. And I frequently get a good laugh imagining people going through life with some of the names I come across, the type that would cause Facebook to shut down accounts.

Doppelgangers and Searchability

by Lisa Radding lradding@ethnictechnologies.com

Last time I posted, I was considering other people who share your name. We all know they are out there; we google ourselves. Most of us are intrigued by the existence of our googlegangers, defined on urbandictionary.com as, “similar to that of a doppelganger, it is another individual with the same name as you whose records and/or stories are mixed in with your own when you google yourself.” Although my one googleganger, that other Lisa Radding, comes up first when you google me, I too show up on the first page of results. But what if your name is Jonathan Smith?

If I type “Jonathan Smith” in the search box on facebook, I get over 500 results. Quickly scanning the first few pages of results, I notice that “Jonathan Smith” is as likely to be Caucasian (with descent from practically anywhere) as African American, but could also be Hispanic or even Asian. Also, he is male. Shelving the ethnicity (and gender) issue for now, however, I’m thinking about how a search on a name like “Jonathan Smith” doesn’t return an individual. In this increasingly electronic world, where many of us want a unique, searchable identity with which to leave our electronic footprint, what can you do if your parents lacked creativity when naming you?

I know a Jonathan Smith who, in some instances, purposely misspells his name so as to differentiate himself. His name on facebook looks something like Jonatthan Smiith or Jonnathan Smithh… you get the idea (and I’m withholding his exact spelling to protect his privacy.) When you search his spelling, he is the only one who turns up in the results page.

Just as companies try to optimize the searchability of their websites by inserting key words into headers and first paragraphs, individuals manipulate their own names. While our googlegangers may pique our curiosity, we also want to possess a unique online identity. Thus as the Internet proliferates society, names evolve without officially changing.

Are these misspellings, such as Jonathhan Smmith, legitimate names? That depends how you understand “legitimate.” My friend Jonathan Smith didn’t officially change his name. Since he still gets mailings addressed to “Jonathan Smith,” for the purposes of our software, the “Jonathan Smith” spelling we have in the database will suffice. (And we will say he is male and English speaking, though beyond that, this name doesn’t give us much to go on.) As I ponder the future of multicultural marketing in an electronic age, however, I anticipate lists from Internet databases. On the Internet we are free to create unofficial names, infinite variations, in order to optimize our individual searchability. If in the future we want our software to correctly identify everyone, we must keep up with the creation of new names and spellings, the human drive to be unique.

Multicultural Name Identification

by Candace candace@ethnictechnologies.com

Conventional wisdom says that America is a melting pot of many different cultures. Try mixing up six different cheeses in a pot then try to find the different taste values of each. It is very difficult to do. The same idea applies to identifying the different cultures that make up our nation. The segmentation system that we habitually use simply divides the population into color or racial categories: White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian. Using this type of approach or methodology has its downfalls and in most cases antiquated census information is used, as it's sole input for development. A better approach is to see the diversity in America as a mixed salad, where each ethnicity is a different ingredient and can be identified. This method, if used properly applies to the many ethnicities and different cultures in our nation and each can be identified.

Marketers, researchers, advertising agencies and the media often market to Hispanics as a separate group from Whites, Blacks and Asians. When you take an in-depth look at the Hispanic population in the Untied States they often associate with one or more of the aforementioned racial groups and those racial groups can be correlated to their country of origin or cultural identity. An individual or family from Puerto Rico does not exhibit the same cultural identity or buying habits as those of a family that has immigrated to the US from Mexico. If that is the case then why do marketers, researchers, advertising agencies and the media often approach Hispanic's as a whole with the same exact offers, disregard their country of origin and then complain that their campaigns were not successful. Even the dialect of the Spanish language they speak differs.

The same issues arise and in greater depth when attempting to target the Asian community, the "One Size Fits All" mentality is often the method used and low response rates and product interests are the norm. With so many different Asian countries of origin and Asian languages of preference currently residing in the US, it is the smart marketer that embraces technology that allows them to identify all ethnicities, countries of origin and languages that are available. An offer tailored to a Chinese American living in San Francisco CA should differentiate from one being tailored to a Korean American living in Fort Lee NJ or a Vietnamese American living in Houston TX. Now if you add into the mix the different levels of assimilation and acculturation, the buying habits and traditional cultural customs the individual embraces are all over the chart.

An individual's ethnicity is not in all circumstances related to ones "Country of Origin". A Deepak Banerjee may have been born in England and then came to our country, but his ethnicity and cultural identity is Indian and in most cases his religion would be Hindu.

Many ethnic and religious groups in the United States maintain a strong cultural identity. They are often attracted to communities with their same ethnicity, communities in which many traditional cultural customs are maintained. Given that the ethnic diversity in the US is far more reflective of a global landscape, it is even more important for marketers to fully understand cultural differences, language preference, purchasing habits and other socioeconomic information and integrate those variations into their everyday marketing strategies and tactics. The time for the" One Size Fits All" methodology is gone that way of the dinosaur.