Have A Coke And A Name

Coca-Cola has a promotion on now, where it is putting names on their cans and bottles. I've seen some displays of bottles where the names are people's names, though the cans sold by the case just have generic titles like "friend" or one of many family relations. And I notice a gender bias there; I just went through a case of twelve that contained three "Mom"s but no "Dad"s. Where are you on that one, Men's Rights Activists?

I noticed that the bin of Coke bottles at the grocery store had names, but a quick glance showed that they were very modern names. Easy to find a "Dylan" bottle, but "John" is out of luck.

That's quite a shift. When I was a kid, I couldn't always count on finding a "Jason" item on pre-made name things. And that was in spite of Jason being the top male name in my cohort. The named-item industry was that slow to react to the changing popularity of names.

But not today, not with Coca-Cola. They've done their homework. And that in itself is somewhat depressing. You know that someone, somewhere in the marketing department studied the popularity of names, and put together some formula that would give the optimum quantity of each name, given its popularity in a given age range, and the company's need to promote its products with that age group. I bet they even did a calculation to figure out how many extra "Dylan" bottles they'd have to print to satisfy the baby boomer music fans who would buy it for the novelty.