February 20, 1997

REEBOK RED-FACED OVER SHOE THAT SHARES NAME WITH SEX-CRAZED DEMON

By RICHARD LORANT
Associated Press Writer

BOSTON (AP) -- 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 spokesman 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 boxes. There are no plans to recall the 53,000 shoes shipped to U.S. retailers.

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

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.

The dictionary defines "incubus" as an evil spirit that in medieval times was thought to descend upon women and have sex with them. A second definition of the word is simply "nightmare."

It is not the first time a major company has goofed over a name. Toyota named its model after Cressida, a woman in Greek mythology mainly known for being unfaithful to her warrior husband, Troilus, during the Trojan War.

Other missed meanings occur because of language differences. The classic example is the Chevrolet Nova. "No va" is Spanish for "It doesn't go."