Branding in the past

In the late 90s, I was a Marketing Executive for an instant beverage company, which introduced new brands to meet consumer demand. One of the biggest challenges was to give the new products appropriate names. Then, my boss always told me to have the letter ‘M’ as the first letter because, McDonalds, Michael Jackson and Madonna were famous names to him.

Using Data Science for branding

Then, I did not have enough data science knowledge not to reject or reject my boss hypothesis - ‘Famous brands/names start with the letter M’. Now, I have scrapped some data from TheFamousPeople, to create some famous brand names.

Load tidyverse and read the cleaned csv file

library(tidyverse)
famous <- read_csv('Famous names.csv')

Get the first letter of First Name

famous %>% select(First_name) %>%
  mutate(first_letter = str_sub(First_name, 1, 1)) %>%
  drop_na() %>%
  count(first_letter) %>%
  mutate(first_letter = fct_reorder(first_letter, n, .desc = FALSE)) %>%
  top_n(26) %>%
  ggplot(aes(first_letter, n)) +
  geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
  coord_flip() +
  ggtitle('Frequency chart of the first letter for First Name')
## Selecting by n

Get the last letter of First Name

famous %>% select(First_name) %>%
  mutate(last_letter = str_sub(First_name, -1)) %>%
  drop_na() %>%
  count(last_letter) %>%
  mutate(last_letter = fct_reorder(last_letter, n, .desc = FALSE)) %>%
  top_n(26) %>%
  ggplot(aes(last_letter, n)) +
  geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
  coord_flip() +
  ggtitle('Frequency chart of the last letter for First Name')
## Selecting by n

Get the length of First Name

famous %>% select(First_name) %>%
  mutate(name_length = str_length(First_name)) %>%
  drop_na() %>%
  count(name_length) %>%
  filter(name_length < 20) %>%
  ggplot(aes(name_length, n)) +
  geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
  ggtitle('Distribution for the length of First Name')

Get the number of vowels in First Name

famous %>% select(First_name) %>%
  mutate(vowel = str_count(First_name, 'a|e|i|o|u')) %>%
  drop_na() %>%
  count(vowel) %>%
  filter(vowel < 9) %>%
  ggplot(aes(vowel, n)) +
  geom_bar(stat = 'identity') +
  ggtitle('Number of vowels in First Name')

Conclusion

My ex-boss wasn’t completely wrong; the letter M is the 3rd most famous first letter. However, if I am tasked to name an instant beverage, I would name it ‘Jalan’.