An ‘L’ of a Difference

In more than 20 years with Scotland Yard, John W. D. Elsworth achieved a very definite identity as an inspector and boxing champion. Now a registered securities dealer in Los Angeles, the transplanted Briton recently was dismayed at an identity problem that fate had brought him.

A John C. Ellsworth (double l ) turned up in the news as a defendant in a securities fraud case filed by the state. Concerned clients of the single- l Elsworth started calling him to ask, “What’s going on?” Worse, he says, others “wouldn’t even answer the telephone to me.”

John single- l did get one call he didn’t expect. John double- l called to apologize for the trouble.

Still on the Scent

Giorgio might have won the latest court battle, but Parfums de Coeur intends to keep the fragrance war alive. The Stamford, Conn., company said it is appealing a California judge’s recent order to stop airing a TV ad for a Parfums fragrance called Primo! The scent is a Giorgio “knockoff” that sells for $7.50 an ounce, compared to $45 for a 3-ounce bottle of Giorgio’s cologne.

Parfums President Mark A. Laracy called the decision “anti-consumer, anti-competition, anti-free speech.”

“We call them the Marie Antoinette marketers,” Laracy said of Giorgio. “They’re elitists. We’re more in the Ralph Nader, consumerist vein.”

Educational Edification

Do Western executives make as much money as their counterparts elsewhere in the country? Apparently not--at least in academia, a new survey suggests.

College presidents in the West are paid $85,470 a year on the average, less than the national average of $89,450, according to a new study by Heidrick & Struggles, an international executive search firm.

But whether such wages sound like a lot or a little, these presidents surely make for an exclusive club: The typical one, nationally, is a 53-year-old, white Protestant male, married to his first wife. (The Westerners are a tad younger, averaging just under 52.) The majority of presidents enjoy such executive-style perquisites as a car, house, domestic help and reimbursement for travel and entertainment.

Of the 329 executives surveyed by the firm, most said that raising money took up the largest amount of their time, followed by public relations. And third? “Academic concerns.”

Getting It Write

A tribal-owned pen and pencil producer in Browning, Mont., is winning contracts from California aerospace companies.

Lockheed Missile & Space Co. in Sunnyvale has signed a one-year, $8,000 contract with Blackfeet Indian Writing Co., which is 82% owned by 6,200 members of the Blackfeet tribe on a 1.5-million-acre reservation in northwestern Montana. TRW’s space and defense division in Redondo Beach already buys about $80,000 a year worth of Blackfeet pens and pencils.

Blackfeet Indian Writing, which had sales of $4.6 million for the year ending March 31, employs 62 reservation residents, said President and Chief Executive Joe McKay, who is a tribe member. Started as a small, minority-owned business marketing primarily to corporations, the company entered the retail pen and pencil market last year. Sales came to $236,000 in 1986, and rose to $980,000 for the first seven months of 1987, McKay said.

Why There’s No Blue Food

For 40 years, the Palo Alto firm of Cheskin+Masten has been studying color and its relation to merchandising--which colors sell products and which don’t. Some of the findings are obvious.

“We don’t want to make hot dogs that are blue,” says President Davis L. Masten. “Yuck.”

But other associations--drawn from extensive consumer interviews--are less obvious. Products wrapped in silver foil are thought of as scientific and progressive but not very good tasting, he says. Blue products are considered comforting and stable, yet cold and filling. Orange products are perceived as artificial.

Sometimes color isn’t the only problem, Masten says. “We had a Canadian manufacturer talk to us once about fruit pizza.”