Name-calling

What the name of your company and products says about you and your business.

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It was Shakespeare, of course, who reognized that the value of a good name exceeds the crass considerations of cash.In the abstract, that is still true. But in the Bard's day, a good name didn't cost upwards of $35,000, as it can today. At least that is generally the price San Francisco-based NameLab, a prominent commercial-names factory, assigns to one of its creations. A bit steep, perhaps, for half-a-dozen or so letters, but a successful brand or corporate name can put a new company on the marketing map, set a product head and shoulders above competitors, and even make its way indelibly into the language. On the other hand, left to chance or collective company wit, a misnamed entity either gets accepted into the Edsel hall of fame or risks becoming just another whatsis.

Not that good names save bad products, admits NameLab founder Ira N. bachrach, but in these days of product me-tooism, a dull or inappropriate christening is undoubtedly a handicap even to the best of the lot. Individual pride of ownership often influences a whole line of ineffectively described goods, like, say, Osborne. And corporate presumption can insist on such dubious items as the Apricot, a microcomputer brand name patterned after the Japanese manner of speech in pronouncing the first two worlds of the product's manufacturer, Applied Computer Techniques. NameLab is devoted exclusively to ensuring that such a fate doesn't befall its clients -- including such market makers as Pepsico, Procter & Gamble, Honda Motor, Hiram Walker, Miles Laboratories, Gillette, Chrysler, RCA, Federal Express, and other big-timers to whom an effective brand name clearly is a prized asset.

In the four years of its existence, NameLab already has left major marks. To position a Nissan Motor Corp. of America entry, it came up with "Sentra." For Nynex, one of the companies to emerge from the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. breakup, NameLab came up with the name "Datago" for the company's chain of retail computer stores about to open in the Northeast. And although NameLab deals mainly with packaged goods and business entities, lately it has been dabbling in movie titles, which, like any other packaged good, also must hazard the economic consequences of drabness. For better or worse, NameLab recently changed ABC Motion Pictures's derivative "The Making of Emma" to "Foxtails."

But despite some 130 jobs to its credit in areas ranging from cars to pastry, NameLab's most notable entry so far came in 1982 on behalf of a tiny start-up that intended to sell portable computers. The founders, two engineers from Texas Instruments Inc., were content to name the company and its product after a local address; hence, Gateway Technology. The little machine presumably could be sold as Gateway, inasmuch as a computer is a "gateway" to some vague, but assuredly noble, end. To scientists, the connection seemed clever enough. But not to the company's prime investors, a partnership headed by Ben Rosen and L. J. Sevin. Justifiably concerned lest Gateway mean little to consumers and even less to Wall Street, Rosen urged that NameLab be consulted. Enter Ira Bachrach, with his intensively linguistic and peculiarly totemic approach to naming things. Within a few weeks, Gateway was presented with several snappier choices, among them Cortex, Cognipak, and Suntek. Oh, yes -- and Compaq.

No one can say for sure that the company might not have done equally well under the banners of Cognipac, Gateway, or even Tip-Top. Nonetheless, as Compaq, the corporation went on to sell $111 million worth of computers in 12 months, a U.S. record for first-year revenues. But this almost didn't come to pass, due to concern that the name might be challenged. In many of its particulars, trademark and service mark law is so vague, confusing, and regionalized that general counsel often prefers the discretion of another choice to the valor of stepping on toes, however unrelated. Gateway's attorneys felt that the proposed new trademark came too close to "Compac," a registered service mark of a transatlantic cable switching network owned by ITT Corp., and asked that it be reconsidered. But with a public offering at stake, the board of directors sought a hot name, and Compaq it stayed. "If you ask lawyers, 'Should I go outside?" Bachrach complains good-humoredly, "they'll say, 'God, you could get run over!"

An expert in marketing packaged goods from an earlier career in advertising, the 46-year-old Bachrach has discovered that the rules there apply to nonpackaged-goods fields as well. To this discipline he also brings an approach to language developed in his graduate thesis that involves relationships among semantic fragments, by which he tried to win the George Bernard Shaw prize for developing an English phonetic alphabet. (Thuh pryez rhemaynz unwon evun toodae.) As a result, many NameLab creations enjoy multiple effects, sometimes via neologisms with implications that are hidden within ancient but evocative roots. To be sure, Compaq computers could easily have been called "Compacts," but with humdrum impact, weaker suggestiveness, and stage-sharing with cars and cosmetics.

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