The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[haysaw]

You don't have to go back that far (and the ghost of Freud is alive and well with this one, not sure about Mondelknees though):

Reebok Exorcising Its Shoes

BY HELEN KENNEDY WITH NEWS WIRE SERVICES

Thursday, February 20, 1997

Red-faced Reebok executives were having a devil of a time yesterday explaining why they named a shoe after Incubus a medieval demon who rapes women as they sleep.

"Certainly it is very inappropriate," Reebok public relations director Dave Fogelson said of the Incubus shoe. "We apologize."

The name which also means evil dream doesn't appear on any of the 53,000 shoes shipped since last year, just on the box. But it was still a bad dream for Reebok.

"I'm horrified, and the company is horrified," said Kate Burnham, another corporate spokeswoman. "How the name got on the shoe and went forward I do not know. We are a company that has built its business on women's footwear, so to do anything that's denigrating to women is not what we're about."

Reebok plans to remove the name from thousands of shoe boxes.

"There's a possibility of maybe coming up with a new label and having people affixing them to the boxes. It could be as simple as taking a Magic Marker and blacking out the name," Fogelson said.

Reebok execs have to dream up 1,500 new product names every year, Fogelson said. Apparently, the only research they did on Incubus was to find out the name wasn't trademarked not to find out what it meant.

"Obviously, it became very apparent to us yesterday why nobody else was using the name," he said.

The other shoe dropped when ABC News aired a report about the $57.99 footwear.

Reebok's blunder isn't as bad as Chevrolet trying to market its Nova in Spanish-speaking countries where "no va" means "doesn't go." But consultants who specialize in creating corporate names were baffled. "The first thing you check is dictionary usage," said Robin Ayres, director of the Naming Center in Dallas.