Product nicknaming refers to a common market practice in which customers refer to a product by any descriptive name that is used interchangeably with the product’s formal name (Zhang & Patrick, 2018). Consumers can either collectively adopt a nickname for a product or brand (e.g., Mickey D’s for McDonald’s), or can create their own nickname for a product (e.g., nicknaming your Amazon Alexa as ‘Lexie’). This practice is increasingly common among smart products such as Virtual Conversational Agents (VCAs), as the product name is an essential part of the words used to start an interaction with these products (i.e., wake words, such as ‘Hey Alexa’ for Amazon’s VCA, and ‘Hey Siri’, for Apple’s VCA). As consumers increasingly search for ways to nickname their own VCAs, it is crucial to understand the potential consequences of such practices. Therefore, in this dissertation, I investigate the effects of VCA nicknaming on consumers’ perceptions of obtaining personalized recommendations from VCAs. Through five studies, I demonstrate that nicknaming a VCA increases consumers’ perceptions that the VCA’s recommendations are more personalized, when compared to using the default product name. My experiments found evidence suggesting that this effect is motivated by the psychological mechanism of an increased relationship closeness between the user and the VCA, which is driven by the usage of endearment terms such as nicknames. In addition, the positive effect of VCA nicknaming was found to be contingent on consumers’ attachment style. Furthermore, consumers’ consumption goals could also undermine the enhancing effects of VCA nicknaming on personalization perceptions. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first research investigating the effects of nicknaming in the VCA product category and the product recommendation context, thus contributing to both areas. Additionally, practitioners can benefit from these findings by exploring cost-effective ways to increase consumers’ personalization perceptions of recommendations by allowing consumers to nickname their products. Lastly, the findings will improve the understanding of how and when to design customized solutions such as VCA nicknaming.