November 16, 1995

Trademarks are being scooped up so fast
it won't be long before NetLoss(TM) is the only name left

Name drain stumps tech companies

By HOWARD BRYANT
Mercury News Staff Writer

Increasingly, a name isn't what it used to be.

Technology companies, desperate to create signature names that resonate with consumers, are realizing that the industry's enormous growth is making it harder to name their products.

Eager for name recognition, many companies fear being lost on retail shelves, left behind by consumers confused by the myriad options - Netscape, NetGuide, ProfNet for example - that contain similar computer lingo.

But the U.S. Office of Patents and Trademarks has an even greater fear: over time, there might not be any computer-related names left.

Already, companies are feeling the pinch to find both name recognition and immediate familiarity with their products. A glut of like-sounding titles - PrintShop, PrintMaster, and Print Artist - put a new company in a bind because the name "print" is a highly trademarked term for design software.

This dearth of names is the result of the explosion in home computing software and a 1989 change in U.S. trademark law, which made it easier for companies to stamp the TM on their products. Today is the sixth anniversary of changes in trademark rules.

Companies are now allowed to register trademarks before a product is formally released. Before the change, a product actually had to be introduced to the public before applying to reserve a trademark.

"A good name is getting harder and harder to find," said S.B. Master, president of Master-McNeil, a Berkeley-based company that specializes in helping companies name their products. "Companies have to get more creative or risk spending major marketing dollars to make their name special."

Computing software is only the best example of the boom in trademark filings. According to a study by Master-McNeil, the number of trademarks issued since 1990 has grown 69 percent, while trademarks for scientific and computer-related products have jumped 112 percent in the same period.

The result of such growth has created an environment where technology companies must conjure up more clever but less obvious names and spend more and more money to market them.

Trademark names are being gobbled up so quickly many new software names have little connection to their function. Companies that have had great success with a single title, such as Intuit and its Quicken personal finance software, are beginning to bundle new products under the same well-established name.

Another way of dealing with the squeeze is to create a non-traditional software name and bolster it with a strong marketing push.

"If anything, having a bit of an odd name is an advantage for us," said Julie Herubin, marketing coordinator for Secure Computing, a Roseville, Minn. company that created Sidewinder, a security system for the Internet. "People remember the name. They say 'Oh, you're the security guys.' "

In the past, software companies could escape being clever by snatching a hip computer term - "net," for instance - as a prefix to a product. Consumers could deduce that a product containing "net" or "cyber" in its name was computer related.

Those days are nearly over.

"Clearly, you'll have to spend more money to create a relationship between product and consumer," said Katherine Salazar-Poss, corporate counsel for Logitech, a Fremont hardware and software company. "Xerox by itself has no meaning to a consumer, but they put forth a great marketing effort and also had great products."

Copyright 1995, San Jose Mercury News. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.

For further information, please contact:

contact@naming.com
Master-McNeil, Inc.
510-486-0947

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