Is Nike female? Exploring the role of sound symbolism in predicting brand name gender

Sridhar Moorthy, Ruth Pogacar, Samin Khan, Yang Xu


Abstract
Are brand names such as Nike female or male? Previous research suggests that the sound of a person’s first name is associated with the person’s gender, but no research has tried to use this knowledge to assess the gender of brand names. We present a simple computational approach that uses sound symbolism to address this open issue. Consistent with previous research, a model trained on various linguistic features of name endings predicts human gender with high accuracy. Applying this model to a data set of over a thousand commercially-traded brands in 17 product categories, our results reveal an overall bias toward male names, cutting across both male-oriented product categories as well as female-oriented categories. In addition, we find variation within categories, suggesting that firms might be seeking to imbue their brands with differentiating characteristics as part of their competitive strategy.
Anthology ID:
D18-1142
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1128–1132
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1142
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1142
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sridhar Moorthy, Ruth Pogacar, Samin Khan, and Yang Xu. 2018. Is Nike female? Exploring the role of sound symbolism in predicting brand name gender. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1128–1132, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is Nike female? Exploring the role of sound symbolism in predicting brand name gender (Moorthy et al., EMNLP 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1142.pdf
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