By Katie Deighton

Workers at Lumon Group, a design company and maker of retractable glazing, were confused. Why were commenters on its Instagram account asking whether they were "severed," and what did that even mean?

It turned out that Lumon shares its brand name with one of the most talked-about corporations of the moment: Lumon Industries, the enigmatic, intimidating and highly fictional employer at the center of the hit Apple TV+ show "Severance."

The psychological drama centers on a group of workers who have undergone Lumon's "severance" procedure, which separates their psyches into separate at-work "innies" and after-work "outies." For two seasons the show has kept viewers guessing what Lumon actually does, but everyone agrees that it can't be good.

Many real-life businesses called Lumon or Lumen have since become the butt of jokes in their industries, according to executives. "Next thing you know, your wife is missing and you don't remember 12 hours of your day," an Instagram user commented on a recent post from Lumen, a maker of metabolic measurement devices. "Praise Kier!" wrote another, referencing the elusive, cultlike founder of the fictional Lumon. The show hasn't had any kind of impact on Lumen's business, a company spokeswoman said.

As "Severance" viewership reaches new heights, the real Lumons and Lumens are deciding whether and how to address their names' new echo.

Some view it as a potential publicity windfall.

"My husband was like, 'We need to capitalize on this now,'" said Dr. Monisha Chadda, the owner of Lumon Dental, a dentist outside of Detroit.

Chadda and her husband discussed tweaking their logo to evoke Lumon Industries, but decided against it for fear of copyright infringement, she said.

Audiences have been so taken by the Lumon of "Severance" that some 6,000 people follow its company page on LinkedIn, while the filming location of its offices -- the Bell Works complex in Holmdel, N.J. -- has turned into a tourist hot spot.

Nobody is flocking to the offices of telecommunications firm Lumen Technologies in Monroe, La. But plenty of people are making comments about the company's connections to its TV homophone, parallels that go beyond the name, said its chief marketing and strategy officer, Ryan Asdourian.

Both companies were founded before 1945 and work in data management, Asdourian pointed out. Lumen manages fiber-optic networks, data centers and cloud computing, while Lumon, among other things, uses severed workers for "macrodata refinement."

Lumen's marketing department sees the "Severance" connection as a fun tie to pop culture -- rare for a business-to-business company -- and is free to run through the parallels with clients, Asdourian said.

Nervous moments

Hollywood has a long history of dreaming up corporate brands, from ACME Corp. in the Looney Tunes cartoons to media behemoth Waystar Royco in HBO's "Succession." But the brand-building behind these fictional companies has grown more complex over time, with producers now hiring creative directors to steer the visual and tonal language of fake brands as much as they would do with real ones, said Lorenzo Bernini, a Milan-based graphic designer who created the Fictional Brands Archive, a catalog of phony companies from movies, TV series and videogames.

"As audiences get more and more comfortable with corporate jargon, and are more receptive to corporate subjects, then writers and directors and showrunners can exploit this preconceived knowledge of corporations and use them in a much more detailed way to tell stories," Bernini said.

The trend has led to nervous moments for some companies.

When USA Network's "Mr. Robot" in 2015 introduced a sinister conglomerate called E-Corp -- "Evil Corp" in the mind of the show's hero -- some people worried it would hurt the reputation of eCORP, a Texas-based sustainable project construction contractor. But the opposite happened, recalled CEO John Thrash.

"Somewhat in accordance with the old adage that 'there is no such thing as bad press,' there was exposure that evolved into some degree of curiosity that led to new contacts," Thrash wrote in an email, "and in the aftermath of such exchanges there were even some parties interested in the company's environmental pursuits."

Lumon, the glazing company, wasn't so enthusiastic about its fictional brand twin when the first season of "Severance" streamed in 2022. People were leaving comments on its Instagram account asking why it was treating employees so poorly -- a reference to the questionable ethics of the made-up company's human resources department, said Kristoph Karbach, executive vice president of the real company's North America business.

"We looked at what we could do with trademark protection and so on, but learned that's really not necessarily something that we can have an impact on," Karbach said.

Turnabout

Hollywood writers are free to call their made-up corporations whatever they like, provided their fictional companies don't too closely resemble or infringe on another in the real world, said Justin M. Jacobson, a trademark attorney based in New York City. Some studios file trademarks for their fictional companies to sell merchandise, but they can't hold a mark for goods or services they have no intention of providing, Jacobson said.

Some entrepreneurs have used that to turn the tables on Hollywood by trademarking fictional brands to use in the real world. Sterling Cooper may be known to TV audiences as the Madison Avenue firm that employed Don Draper on "Mad Men," but it is now also the name of an advertising agency based in Egypt. STARK Industries operates not from Tony Stark's sprawling campus in the Marvel universe, but from an office in real-world Columbus, Ohio.

The glazing company Lumon continues to receive sporadic jokes and bizarre messages referencing "Severance." A job posted earlier this month for a salesperson in Poland received 200 applications -- almost four times the company's usual amount. When asked for interviews, many applicants stated they had applied just for the fun of handing Lumon their résumés.

But Lumon has also noticed that more people in North America are reaching its website after googling the name, and it is trying to capitalize. Last week, it published a blog post titled "What's the Difference Between Lumon Group and Lumon Industries?"

"We welcome you and want to address the elephant in the room: We have the same name as an antagonistic corporation from one of the biggest streaming series of all time," it reads. "But that's where the similarities stop."

Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 17, 2025 06:00 ET (10:00 GMT)

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