Deriving age and gender from forenames for consumer analytics

This paper explores the age and gender distributions of the bearers of British forenames and identifies key trends in British naming conventions. Age and gender characteristics are known to greatly influence consumption behaviour, and so extracting and using names to indicate these characteristics from consumer datasets is of clear value to the retail and marketing industries. Data representing over 17 million individuals sourced from birth certificates and market data have been modelled to estimate the total age and gender distributions of 32,000 unique forenames in Britain. When aggregated into five year age bands for each gender, the data reveal distinctive age profiles for different names, which are largely a product of the rise and decline in popularity of different baby names over the past 90 years. The names database produced can be used to infer the expected age and gender structures of many consumer datasets, as well as to anticipate key characteristics of consumers at the level of the individual. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.