ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 20, 1997 TAG: 9702200035
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BOSTON
So you're a bunch of highly paid creative types brainstorming a name for a new athletic shoe. Michael Jordan? Taken. Chuck Taylor? Ditto.
Here's an idea: Name a women's running shoe after the mythical demon Incubus, who had sex with women in their sleep.
Reebok did. Now it's doing some major backpedaling.
``I'm horrified, and the company is horrified,'' Reebok spokeswoman Kate Burnham said. ``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.''
Incubus has been on the market for about a year, and Reebok officials said there have been no customer complaints. Instead, they learned of the name's meaning from ABC, which aired a story about it Tuesday.
Reebok said Wednesday it is looking into ways of wiping out the offending name, which appears not on the $57.99 shoes themselves but on the 53,000 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,'' spokesman Dave Fogelson said.
Fogelson said in-house marketers came up with the name in 1995. He said the legal department even researched the name to make sure no one else had patented it. He didn't know whether anyone bothered to look it up in the dictionary,
``I cannot imagine any responsible individual knowing what this name means and deciding that it's appropriate,'' Fogelson said. which defines ``incubus'' as an evil spirit that in medieval times was thought to descend on women and have sex with them. A second definition is ``nightmare.''
It is not the first major-company goof. Toyota named a model after Cressida, a woman in Greek mythology mainly known for being unfaithful to her warrior husband, Troilus.
Other missed meanings occur because of language differences. The classic example is the Chevrolet Nova. ``No va'' is Spanish for ``It doesn't go.''
- Associated Press
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB