Have you ever seen a piece of research that seems too strange to be true?

The upcoming August edition of the Journal of Consumer Research (JCR) has one study that adds a new dimension to digital marketing, particularly if you have a list of repeat customers or subscribers.

According to Kurt Carlson of Georgetown University and Jacqueline Conard of Belmont University, the chances we get in childhood directly affect how quickly we make buying decisions as adults.

In particular, if your surname begins with an A, you’re more likely to find yourself at the front of the queue for all manner of school-age activities.

Those with a Z-name, by contrast, find themselves at the back of the line more often – and become more opportunistic as a result.

Across four separate experiments reported in the upcoming issue of the JCR, the authors found Z-namers faster to respond to special offers and giveaways than their counterparts from earlier in the alphabet.

They write:

The last-name effect is especially important to retailers and salespeople because customer names are easy for marketers to obtain and because there are many decisions in which the decision is not whether to buy, but when to buy.

So, if you have a customer database, you might want to look to the bottom of the list in the hopes of getting a quick return on any future special offers.

The Z-list Naysayers

Not everybody is convinced by the research - over at Smithsonian magazine, Z-namer Sarah Zielinski says she often takes her time over buying decisions.

She argues that the researchers also do not find out whether the faster-buying end-of-listers are shopping on instinct – and are therefore more impressionable - or whether they have developed a trait that gives them an advantage when a new offer is launched.

For those of us with goods or services to sell, a sale is a sale. But if the research is to be believed, it could take a closer client relationship to convert an A-namer into a buyer than it takes for a Z-namer.

So to drive impulse buys? Easy – target the second half of your subscriber list.

The take-home message: Later names buy early; early names buy late.