CONSUMERS : 1-800-Vanity : Like Personalized License Plates, Stylized Phone Numbers Suddenly Are Chic

When Darlene Thornton succumbed to a long-standing entrepreneurial urge and launched a public address system sales firm from a little cubicle off the bedroom of her upstairs duplex in Long Beach, she wanted one business tool more than any other.

So she called up a customer service representative at AT&T; Co. She said she wanted her new toll-free 800 number to spell out a message that would make her firm, Don May Marketing Co., and its product line stick out in the minds of customers.

A quick scan of available digit combinations by the AT&T; salesperson brought about assignment of the telephone number of Darlene Thornton’s dreams: (800) 826-AMPS.

As far as Thornton is concerned, all she was doing was trying to sell public address systems. But to AT&T;, Pacific Bell and at least a few experts on short-term human memory, Thornton was getting in on a fast-growing trend. In much the same way vanity license plates took over California freeways, vanity telephone numbers have become one of the hottest business fads of the 1980s.

Although AT&T; says no clear regional trends have emerged, in Southern California, where interest in vanity phone numbers appears to be setting a brisk pace for the rest of the country, Kerry Brice, an AT&T; customer relations supervisor, estimated that half of all new orders for toll-free business service specify numbers that can be made--albeit sometimes tortuously--into words.

In fact, the phone company encourages sales personnel to sell 8- 9- and 10-letter numbers for greater variety in vanity selections. The first seven process the call; the last one, two or three are superfluous.

The vanity phone number trend has developed so amorphously that AT&T; doesn’t even have a formal term for these listings, though a company spokesman said that, if there was one, vanity numbers probably wouldn’t be it. Left to its own devices, an AT&T; spokesman said, the company probably would use personalized phone numbers.

A Visalia store that sells Christian supplies has (800) BIBLE 4 U. A small company that makes hand-embroidered cushions uses (800) PILLOW TALK. A wholesaler in Calabasas trying to get a foothold in the imprinted shirt business is (800) BRAWNY T.

A firm that monitors infants who suffer from respiratory problems lets parents call with questions about their children’s health on (800) 2 WATCH U. A dental hygienist attracts customers with (800) T 4 TOOTH. An eyeglass retailer has (800) GLASSES. A purveyor of another familiar communications fad item uses (800) 833 BEEP.

And a lawsuit has been filed to resolve who has rights to a number of special significance to a pizza parlor chain: (800) DOMINOS.

Asked which vanity number she had called most recently herself, Brice of AT&T; thought for a moment and identified--with an embarrassed laugh--976-LUCK, a local vanity listing operated by the California Lottery.

In the case of (800) 826-AMPS, Darlene Thornton more or less left it to her daughter, Kate Tullman, to conjure up the number. And neither of the two women, Thornton said, had ever heard of--much less taken into account--something psychologists call the phonetic mnemonic system.

“I’m not arty,” Thornton said, “but this fits in perfectly because amplifiers are what we sell.”

But by being bitten by the vanity phone number bug, Thornton and her daughter were unwittingly accepting a basic tenet of behavioral science.

The memory theory in question acknowledges that some people might be called word people and others number people in terms of their facility for remembering things. But most of us are word people, experts say, who find it easier to recall short, organized bursts of letters that link together into something easy to remember.

“We’re finding a lot of people who are referring other people to the number,” said Mike McClure, of Christian Service and Supply in Visalia. “That was part of the plan. I wanted something that would be easy to remember for people who wanted to shop by phone. The AT&T; guy said, ‘Well, how about BIBLE 4 U?’ ”

There are no figures on how many vanity phone numbers have been created. Brice said AT&T; and other long-distance suppliers actually assign and keep records of vanity numbers by digit only. As far as AT&T; is concerned, for instance, Darlene Thornton has (800) 826-2677.

Numbers Catching On

And if you call directory assistance for an 800-number, you will be given numbers only. But, Brice said, the speed at which vanity numbers are catching on probably makes it inevitable that they will be available through directory assistance within the next few years.

Theoretically, an AT&T; spokesperson said, there are 7.92 million possible number combinations in area code 800, only about half a million of which are taken now. There are an equal number of sequences in area code 900, which costs the caller, and which is reserved for services that sell information such as sports results.

AT&T; says it doesn’t know of any strictly residential customers who have taken out vanity numbers, but Brice said the firm often does not know a specific number has been requested to make up a word--and frequently isn’t told by the customer what the word actually is. Since three letters on each of the eight digits on the keypad that have both letters and numbers, it is often not possible to guess the word simply from the number.

One of the odder aspects of the current run on vanity phone numbers is that no one seems to know whether or not they work.

Telephone company officials concede that no organized research has been done to test the basic premise: that word symbols will stick in people’s memories more readily than numbers. But, behavior experts say the new telephone rage is based on sound science.

In fact, numbers are so notoriously difficult for most people to remember that games and schemes to make memorizing them easier have been a fixture of human civilization since the time of the Greeks, according to Gordon Bower, a Stanford University memory expert. Because accurate recall of numbers was so difficult in the time when most history was oral, a system was developed by French mathematician Pietro Herigon in 1634 that presaged today’s vanity phone number rage.

Substituting Sounds

Herigon developed what came to be called the phonetic mnemonic system, in which consonant sounds were substituted for each number from 1 through 10. Mnemonics is the overall term, in psychology jargon, for systems to help people remember.

In this system, said Gary Patton, a psychology professor at Indiana University in Pennsylvania, the number 3 becomes the sound of the letter m and the number 2 is the sound of n or ng . Vowels serve only to connect the consonant sounds assigned to numbers. Thus, the word man translates to the number 32, said Patton, who is one of the few contemporary experts in the foibles of human number-memory.

“It’s just a brute fact of life that we do remember words better than numbers,” Stanford’s Bower said. “A number, for most of us, is just an unrelated set of digits.”

But by the late 1950s, telephone companies had begun to agitate for elimination of familiar word exchange names (such as RIchmond 8, a downtown Los Angeles exchange), and psychologists began focusing on the telephone number as a subject for study. One such study at Bell Laboratories, owned by AT&T;, found digits would be easier to remember than the traditional names, but the finding prompted a furor in behavior science circles as other researchers accused the Bell Laboratories team of slanting its findings.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, other researchers published studies that found that the memory pathways of the human brain have capabilities exactly the opposite of what the phone company concluded. In 1973, a researcher at Brooklyn College in New York concluded that, based on a study of recall among 90 students, the most effective way to communicate any telephone number was as a contrived word or word series.

The research used telephone numbers from the Brooklyn White Pages, which were transformed into old-style listings with a word exchange and five digits and then to all letters. So the previous 763-8623 became “SO FUN BE.”

The 1973 paper called for abandonment of the digit dialing system in favor of the old exchange system. But at the same time, it recognized a difficulty that today’s vanity phone number craze is only starting to take seriously, according to Saul Sternberg, a University of Pennsylvania psychology professor and former researcher at Bell Laboratories.

While the Brooklyn research found that all-word phone numbers were easiest of all to remember, the limitations of the language in permitting formation of meaningful words would make such a system impractical. The research recognized, for instance, that a word number like “AD A GAME” (232-4263) could be heard wrong, leading to someone trying to dial it as “ADD A GAME.”

The problem with vanity numbers, Sternberg said, is that--since many of them are featured in radio advertising or may be passed from person to person orally--the potential for confusion begins to exceed the advantage of the brain’s preference for word cues. Consider for example the ease with which for might be entered as 4 in a vanity phone number or the letter u might be substituted for the word you .

Too, said Sternberg and Robert Lorsch, a Los Angeles telemarketing expert, since today’s telephone users are so accustomed to using numbers, the advantage of a vanity phone number that can be remembered easily may be lost as the caller stares in frustration at the keypad trying to find the buttons with the right letters.

“I think this is an example of a marketing strategy that sounds right, feels right to the advertiser because it is cute and creative, but, if you really bother to think it through, is more difficult for the consumer to use,” Lorsch said.

Designer Phones

At the same time, Lorsch noted that, just as vanity phone numbers are coming into more widespread popularity, some manufacturers of so-called designer phones are starting to drop letters from the keypads of their products.

While virtually the entire telephone product line sold by AT&T; still includes the traditional letters assigned to eight of the 10 numerals on the telephone dial, telephone specialty shops sell a small but apparently growing array of equipment on which no letters appear.

“The (vanity) concept is probably valid from the behavioral standpoint,” Lorsch said, “but then you’ve got to translate the word into numbers.

“There are so many opportunities for error and phones with no numbers on them, to begin with, that, when you (take into practical consideration the total process of using vanity numbers), it’s a whole different story.”