Behind the Creation of Genie the Rabbit, a Salesforce Character

You want to earn your customers’ trust, now more than ever. But delivering out-of-this-world experiences, at scale, in real time, across your whole organization isn’t exactly easy. In short, you need customer magic. 

Enter Genie the Rabbit, a Salesforce character.

Genie the Rabbit represents Data Cloud, bringing real-time agility, speed, and near-infinite data to every customer interaction. Genie is kind, helpful, witty, fun, and helps you achieve incredible things. Genie brings a data-driven sparkle to everything they touch, infusing customer magic into every interaction. 

Thanks to Data Cloud, Customer 360 is now the first real-time CRM, making every interaction across sales, marketing, service, commerce, and more feel like magic. 

Now let’s answer a few questions that might be on your mind. 

How did we come up with Genie the Rabbit?  

Genie is the latest addition to the family of Salesforce characters, each of which has a specific role and purpose, and shares our vision for making technology friendlier and more accessible. It all started in 1999, when Salesforce changed the notion of what enterprise software could be — easier to purchase, simpler to use, and more democratic without the difficulties of installation, maintenance, and constant upgrades. Our characters embrace the fun side of our company, and inspire our community.

With Genie, the team went through a purposeful process, thinking about the product and all the things it could do, said Orme Dominique, associate creative director at Salesforce. 

“The idea that you could have all your customer data in one place, in real time, this idea of immediacy and that it touches every aspect of what we do,” Dominique said. “We thought, well, it delivers magical customer experiences.”

OK, but why a rabbit? 

We sketched out a lot of ideas, mostly focusing on magic, clouds, and flight. We considered a bunch of interesting and magical creatures, including unicorns, cloud formations, and even dragons. 

As always we also asked our MVP community (our most passionate product experts), who play a huge part in everything we do at Salesforce. We showed them our potential character concepts. 

One of our community members suggested the idea of a rabbit as a data analyst. Others loved the association with magic and speed. Then we started sketching. Check out some early iterations of Genie.

We considered a rabbit with a hat. But the versions with a special wand felt more powerful, because it meant that our friend didn’t need to rely on tricks or illusion to be successful. 

In the end, our community gravitated towards our rabbit as much as we did, and it quickly became the clear favorite.

What else made rabbits such a good fit for Data Cloud? Well, they are fast, which represents the real-time interactions enabled by Data Cloud. They are also agile, creative, and — to many — connote magic. Rabbits are known for having near 360-degree vision, and Data Cloud delivers all of these elements when it comes to your customers. 

“Magical creatures can do magical things,” said Dominique. “Data Cloud helps customers unify data in ways they never would have been able to before. It can do a lot of magic now, and will do more.”

So what does Data Cloud do?

Data Cloud brings a nearly infinite amount of dynamic data to Customer 360 in real time.  It works with Salesforce artificial intelligence and Flow automation to create the first ever real-time CRM. 

Thanks to this innovation, every interaction, ad clicked, sale, and service case come together in real time — with safety and security top of mind —  to create the most innovative and  complete customer profile imaginable. 

The result? Your whole business is united and upleveled through data, so customer experiences feel like pure magic.