Reach Out and, Well, AirTouch Someone : Marketing: After great expense and much agonizing, PacTel Corp. shows off its new corporate name.

Freedom, spontaneity, ubiquity, interconnection. Highly personal. Perfect.

Advertising copy for a new fragrance? A brochure for a self-improvement workshop?

No. It’s PacTel Corp. chief Sam Ginn, describing the new name for his $12-billion wireless communications company: AirTouch Communications.

Forgive Ginn for using language that would make a seasoned wine critic blush ruby red. PacTel just spent a lot of time and money to come up with its new moniker.

And it’s not alone.

With so many words already taken, legally speaking, coining a phrase is tricky business. It is especially tough in fields such as PacTel’s, where technological advances beget new products and render old or poorly conceived names obsolete.

PacTel, directed by regulators to rename itself as part of a corporate spinoff from Pacific Telesis Group, took several months to choose AirTouch from a list that at one time held some 3,000 names.

It paid tens of thousands of dollars to a specialized firm to guide the search and will pay far more to put AirTouch onto everything from buildings to beepers.

So what’s in a name? Here’s Ginn at last week’s unveiling:

“AirTouch is the perfect name to describe what we do. Air exemplifies freedom, spontaneity, ubiquity. It’s all around us. It’s everywhere. And touch is highly personal, suggesting staying in touch; it’s customer-focused, customer-friendly and relates to the concept of interconnection.

“But perhaps most important, AirTouch is the only name among our major competitors that most clearly suggests a benefit to the customer,” Ginn said. “And it communicates a benefit without specifically saying how, which gives us a name that will remain viable for decades to come, regardless of changes in technology.”

Pure exaggeration, said David Coursey, publisher of P.C. Letter, a newsletter for personal computer executives.

Coursey acknowledged that names are important--he cited actors who change theirs as examples--but he says a name’s importance pales next to a company’s performance.

“A name can help you or a name can hurt you, but not as much as a good product or a bad product,” he said.

“Five years from now, AirTouch will have no meaning. At some point, the words lose their meaning entirely. I mean, what’s a Dr Pepper? The company or product or service defines the word.

“Sometimes I think we make too much of them, and these people who do naming make fools of us,” he said.

Those might sound like fighting words. But Coursey won’t get much of an argument from Rick Bragdon, the San Francisco consultant who managed the 12-week process that led PacTel to AirTouch.

“I often say to my clients . . . ‘Look, folks. I know this seems like life or death. But let’s not take it too seriously, because your customers will adapt,’ ” said Bragdon, president of Addison Design Consultants.

So why pay so much money to companies like Addison? Why sit through all-day brainstorming sessions, pay for focus group studies, conduct trademark searches and agonize over subtle differences?

For one thing, names do set a tone.

“The name really helps at the time of the change. It signals something--either a new direction or a new articulation of what you are. It gives you the power to communicate something,” said Lee Ballard, director of the Naming Center, a Dallas-based division of Richards Group Inc.

For another, the corporate graveyard is filled with the bodies of executives who infringed on existing trademarks or went mad trying to avoid it. That’s why the name smiths are adept at combining words (AirTouch comes to mind) or making them up (put some Exxon in your Lexus?).

Finally, names are valuable corporate commodities, so you don’t want to pick one likely to become outmoded quickly.

“We’re looking to the future,” Ballard said. “We want to do it once. We want to do it well.”