New Survey Finds 74% Of Workers Struggle With Name Pronunciation At Work & 10% Missed Sales Opportunities Because Of It

$995 Survey Helps Namecoach Bust Out of Their Niche and Land Series A Funding

Challenge

Pigeonholed in one industry, Namecoach couldn’t break out: they knew they could win a lot of business in other categories, but no one outside their niche knew them.

Strategy

Namecoach wanted to increase brand awareness and hired the agency Data+PR. Their pitch: to get known and to establish credibility, bring data.

Data+PR used Researchscape’s 5-question omnibus, Headlines without Headaches, a $995 service run over a weekend, to measure the sentiment, expectations and feelings around a topic no one was writing about: the impact of mispronouncing names at work.

Researchscape surveyed 1,060 US consumers about their experiences having interviewers mispronounce their names. The study was conducted from July 9 to 12, 2021, and found that 44% of those surveyed have had their names mispronounced, and of those, 59% were Hispanic. In regards to pronunciation issues in the workplace, 41% of employees surveyed stated that their names were mispronounced during a meeting with customers.

Impact

The news release was distributed to 950 media outlets, of whom 101 republished it. Of these, four produced feature articles in publications important to Namecoach. Read more at NameCoach, World Biz Magazine, HR Dive, or SHRM. This survey-backed exposure helped Namecoach win Series A funding and score a feature in TechCrunch.

It didn’t end there. The research is still paying off. Three years later, it was cited by MIT Sloan Management Review. Namecoach is now the first name in pronunciation data.

Author Notes:

Jeffrey Henning

Jeffrey Henning, IPC is a professionally certified researcher and has personally conducted over 1,400 survey research projects. Jeffrey is a member of the Insights Association and the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers. In 2012, he was the inaugural winner of the MRA’s Impact award, which “recognizes an industry professional, team or organization that has demonstrated tremendous vision, leadership, and innovation, within the past year, that has led to advances in the marketing research profession.” In 2022, the Insights Association named him an IPC Laureate. Before founding Researchscape in 2012, Jeffrey co-founded Perseus Development Corporation in 1993, which introduced the first web-survey software, and Vovici in 2006, which pioneered the enterprise-feedback management category. A 35-year veteran of the research industry, he began his career as an industry analyst for an Inc. 500 research firm.