You can't take it with you

A top ad man has been banned from having his surname above his own door. Alex Benady asks: whose name is it anyway?

Mark Wnek is bemused. "When you first realise someone else is using your name," he says, "it feels like part of your soul has been stolen." The adman - one of the most flamboyant in the business - recently left the employ of a company known as Euro RSCG Wnek Gosper. With two colleagues, he has just started a new company. But much as he would like it to, his new firm will not carry the distinctive name "Wnek". Instead, it will be called "Mark, Ben and Orlando".

For Wnek no longer owns the right to call his business after his surname. Stung by his departure, his former company has invoked a clause in his contract that forbids him from using his own name in a rival operation for two years.

Wnek says that his former employer is perfectly within its rights to keep his name. "I signed the contract agreeing to the terms, so I can't complain." But on an emotional level, he says that seeing it being used by others comes as a bit of a shock.

A name is not simply a possession, it is part of you, and you might expect that it is a fundamental human right to use it as you want. But as Wnek and many like him have discovered, in business you have surprisingly few rights over this very basic aspect of self.

This is hardly surprising when you think about it, says Yanis Kavounis of the branding agency Interbrand. "Your name starts out as just that. But after extensive usage and the building of reputation and image, it starts to become a brand, a serious financial asset with real value as part of a company's goodwill. The brand can then become completely dissociated from the individual. So, when you leave you can't take it with you, any more than you can take the company's physical assets."

It was a lesson learnt the hard way by Dave Trott, another well- known advertising executive. Despite the obvious potential for confusion, at one point in the late Nineties there were no fewer than three rival companies all bearing his name: Gold Greenlees Trott; Bainsfair Sharkey Trott; and Walsh Trott Chick Smith.

He left the first in 1994, after falling out with his partners. "I discovered, to my irritation, that because of the way the company was set up, they were entitled to use it after I had left. I helped to build that company, and afterwards I felt a bit like a man driving past the house he used to live in and seeing a new man in there with his wife and kids.

"Next time round, I made sure that they had to stop using my name within a year of departure," he says.

Often, how an individual feels about their name being used is related to the commercial success of the enterprise. The inventor Sir Clive Sinclair says that he was indifferent to seeing his name on someone else's products after he sold out to the Amstrad boss Alan Sugar. "I sold my name for use on computers. I didn't mind at all at the time. But if they had gone on to be the next Microsoft, I might have felt very differently."

Much more hard done by are the masses of individuals who are prevented from trading under their own name simply because they have the misfortune to have the same name as a major company. "The problem is that if firms don't assiduously protect their trademarks, they can lose them," says the trademark lawyer Mark Stephens, of the solicitors Finer Stephens Innocent.

Thus, a few years ago, the hamburger chain McDonald's famously prevented a Scottish woman called McDonald from opening a sandwich bar under her own name. "Technically, she was in the same class of business as them, so they had the right to stop her. But its almost inconceivable that anyone would have mistaken one for the other," says Stephens.

Meanwhile, sometimes one is moved to sympathy - even, heaven help us, by ad men.

Mark Wnek has just discovered that RSCG Wnek Gosper - the firm that felt so strongly that he had no rights to his own name, "Wnek" - has decided to rebrand itself. Mark Wnek still cannot use his name - but the advertising company doesn't want it any more. Henceforth, it is to be known as Euro RSCG London.