Is repeating someone’s name charming—or creepy?

When he meets someone, he repeats their name in conversation and sometimes writes the moniker in his phone to aid his memory.

“I view it as the superpower we all have that no one uses," said Fahey, a 33-year-old basketball coach at Hampton University in Virginia.

Politicians, executives and others have long used this subtle tactic to get ahead. But as a new wave of professionals are being trained to remember and say names, they’re encountering resistance from those who find it more creepy than charming.

Steve Dickerman, who runs a startup in Chicago, won’t work with people who say his name frequently. He said his company was set on buying a certain artificial-intelligence tool until a salesman repeated his name so often it seemed aggressive.

“He was doing stuff like, ‘OK Steve, would you be totally opposed to trying this out?’ and ‘Steve, I’m hearing from you it sounds like you’re worried,’" he said.

Dickerman, 34, said it was clear the person was using manipulative sales tactics. His startup instead chose another service with a less pushy salesperson.

TJ Guttormsen, who teaches communication courses, said it’s easy to see when someone is repeating a name to try to influence others.

“I feel icky when someone says my name every other sentence," he said.

Salespeople kept saying his name when he tried to buy a car in Las Vegas, he said. He ended up buying his car online.

“When they keep trying to force it, that gets exhausting," he said.

Still, Guttormsen, 42, said he makes a point to try to learn and repeat people’s names—without overdoing it. He said he attended a networking conference in Norway and called out the name of a speaker he had researched beforehand.

“It was a reaction of, ‘Hey, how do you know who I am?’ " he said. “He wasn’t familiar or famous or anything like that and wasn’t expecting any of us to know him."

They struck up a bond and the speaker later worked with Guttormsen to create a communication course that they sold to Norwegian businesses, Guttormsen said.

Frank Cespedes, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, teaches his students that it’s important to remember details like names and how to pronounce them so that a business interaction feels more personal. He said in his classroom, students sometimes bristle if their name is mispronounced.

Research shows that people’s brains perk up when they hear their own name. Self-improvement author Dale Carnegie, who is considered a godfather of this strategy, famously said in 1936, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language."

Some service-industry workers say they find it condescending when customers address them by name. James Davis, who worked at businesses including restaurants and grocery stores, said he wonders if people said his name to try to get a discount.

When he worked at a gas station one summer, the 53-year-old said a repeat customer whose name he didn’t remember liked to burst in and yell, “James!"

“That sense of familiarity is forced at best," he said. “It made me uncomfortable."

The company Dale Carnegie, named after the author, offers courses on how to remember names. One strategy is to associate a person’s name with a related mental image. For example, someone named Melody could be pictured with musical notes around her. A person named David could be linked to David Beckham, the soccer player.

The company’s president and chief executive, Joe Hart, said he makes an effort to learn the names of people he meets, including restaurant servers. He said his children were a little embarrassed when he did this on a recent vacation in California.

“They’re like, ‘Oh Dad,’ " he said. “But I think they understand it."

Hart doesn’t mind their embarrassment. He said asking for someone’s name can be a small act of kindness in an increasingly lonely society.

“I do believe people are recognizing we have to try to have stronger connections with other people and part of that is by saying their name," he said.

Shinjini Das encourages her LinkedIn followers to remember a name by repeating it throughout a conversation. Das, a 33-year-old who lives outside Atlanta and runs a brand marketing company, said mentioning someone’s name is a sign of respect.

“Something I’ve realized, Alyssa, is it’s really unprofessional when somebody is bad at names," she said. “It’s kind of embarrassing unless there’s a medical reason."

Write to Alyssa Lukpat at alyssa.lukpat@wsj.com.