Generating Product Reviews with AI

Generating opinionated product reviews.  Nice general idea, but how well?  

 Everyone Has Opinions, Even AI

Dartmouth College, David Hirsch, April 25, 2022

Dartmouth College computer scientists trained an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to produce opinionated product reviews. They trained the algorithm on thousands of published wine and beer reviews, then had it generate its own human-like reviews of such products. With the help of faculty at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, review-writing code was developed to turn the algorithm into a marketing tool. Said Tuck's Prasad Vana, "Using [AI] to write and synthesize reviews can create efficiencies on both sides of the marketplace. The hope is that AI can benefit reviewers facing larger writing workloads and consumers who have to sort through so much content about products."... ' 

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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.   .... "

P&G Uses SmartLabel Platform

P&G is leader in using means to get to details about thousands of their products.

P&G using technology to peel back curtain on thousands of products on the shelf   By Andy Brownfield  – Reporter, Cincinnati Business Courier

Cincinnati-based consumer goods giant Procter & Gamble Co. is giving consumers an easier way to get insight into thousands of its products using new technology.

Procter & Gamble (NYSE: PG) announced Monday that more than 3,500 of its products are using SmartLabel, a platform that gives consumers on their smartphones or computers detailed information on products, such as ingredients, use instructions, certifications and endorsements. According to a news release, P&G now has more items across more categories on the SmartLabel platform than any other consumer product goods company.

The SmartLabel platform works like this:

Winning with 3D Printing

From Bain & Company:   An infographic:   "  ... Winning with 3D Printing.  How additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, can help companies rethink product design. ....  The cost of complexity is no longer a design barrier ..... "   Not sure if the final statement is necessarily or even often true.  But nicely done.   Has link to a longer text outline.

Digital Sampling Analytics

Good idea.  I recall some ideas like this being mocked up, this formalizes the capability. I would want to take it further into an IOT dimension.

Startup takes product sampling into the digital age 
Two-year-old company Sampler was founded to help brands target and measure the distribution of product samples. The company, which was selected by Mondelez to participate in the Shopper Futures program, provides CPG companies with a management and analytics platform that takes traditional samples into the digital age with branded social sampling applications that give brands insights into their customers and allow them to continue to communicate with them, Sampler founder and CEO Marie Chevrier said  ... "