Naming Products with Deep Learning

Perhaps an example of creativity, which most would call naming a product.   Not quite sure this is that, but the approach is interesting.   Creativity with naming does depend on goals,  contexts,  and  impressions.   Some of our most successful brand names lie Google, Amazon and Apple could hardly be considered obvious.   The success of the choice also takes some time to play out.  Certainly an interesting approach for the generation part of names.

Product Naming with Deep Learning  in DataNami   By Rosaria Silipo and Kathrin Melcher

We do not usually associate artificial intelligence (AI) with creativity. Generally, AI algorithms are used to automatize repetitive tasks or predict new outcomes based on previously seen examples. The creative process can sometimes be repetitive and tedious, too. So, would artificial intelligence be able to provide inspirational thoughts?

Let’s take a classic creative marketing example: product naming. The moment a product is pushed out onto the market, the most creative minds of the company come together to generate a number of proposals for product names that must sound familiar to the customers and yet are new and fresh too. Of all those candidates, ultimately only some will survive and be adopted as the new product names. Not an easy task!

Now let’s take one of the most creative markets: fashion labels. A company specializing in outdoor wear has a new line of clothes ready for the market. The problem is to generate a sufficiently large number of candidate names for the new line of clothing. Names of mountains were proposed, as many other outdoor fashion labels do. However, names needed to be original to stand out in the market and differentiate from similar competitor products.

Why not use fictive mountain names that are based on real mountain names? On the one hand, they would be different from competitor names, but on the other hand, they would sound familiar to customers. Could an AI model help generate new fictive mountain names that still sound realistic enough and are evocative of adventure?

To help the marketing department, we asked a many-to-many recurrent neural network (RNN) to generate mountain-related new names. We built and trained a many-to-many long short term memory (LSTM) network to generate new name candidates from existing mountain names for the outdoor clothing line.   .... "