Materion Branding Program Receives National Honors

Materion’s branding campaign received national honors from the Public Relations Society of America’s Silver Anvil Awards presented last week in New York. The Company was presented with the Society’s prestigious Award of Excellence for our category, which is second to the top Silver Anvil honors that went to IBM.

The public relations profession’s most prestigious honor, the Silver Anvil award acknowledges the highest level of achievement and is the established icon of the “best of the best” public relations practices.“Congratulations to the Corporate Branding Team and the many other Materion employees who were involved in making the Materion brand launch activities a success internally, with our customers and worthy of this recognition,” commented Patrick Carpenter, Vice President, Corporate Communications.  “What makes Materion’s Award of Excellence even more gratifying is to know that the IBM campaign that edged us for the top honors in our category won the overall “best in show” award among 143 entrants for all campaigns across a range of categories.”

Patrick S. Carpenter
Vice President, Corporate Communications

But one of the first challenges new companies face is coming up with a name, which can be a difficult task.

For instance, would Google be as successful if it were named ‘BackRub’ — the name when the company started in 1996. And Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said his company considered calling his company Twitch instead.

“I liked the word twitch, but I felt really bad about it,” he says. “I didn’t feel bad about Twitter at all. I wrote it down a bunch of times. I drew it out. It just felt great, so I knew that if I felt great about it, then I could convince others to feel great about it, too.”

It wasn’t the name Twitter that made the company what it is today, but it was Dorsey’s relationship to that name that helped it be successful — he liked it, so he could sell it to investors and to the public.

A company name is important because it’s how companies connect with consumers, investors and other businesses.

We hired a publicity agency, and they give you an image for your company and they said, ‘You got to get rid of the name Apple. It just doesn’t suggest enough power. Your computers can do a lot of stuff.’

Gail Anne Grosso, who has helped several Fortune 500 companies come up with their names, gave some feedback to two new tech startup companies. She says first impressions are important.

“Well, dump is a word that, traditionally, is associated with, a rather not too thought through activity,” Grosso says. “It just sort of seems like something that a dog would do.”

But Grosso does believe Tereza Nemessanyi is on the right track with her new app, Honestly Now.

She says the name gives off the impression that the app will cast light on something. Which is exactly what Nemessanyi says it does. Honestly Now is a place users can go to pose a question to a group of friends or experts and receive anonymous feedback.

Regardless of Grosso’s impressions, it’s hard to know if either company will be successful since they’re both new.

A company that isn’t so young but is very successful — Apple — didn’t get the best reaction to its name when it started back in the 1970s, co-founder Steve Wozniak says.

“We hired a publicity agency, and they give you an image for your company and they said, ‘You got to get rid of the name Apple. It just doesn’t suggest enough power. Your computers can do a lot of stuff,’” he says at a gadget show in downtown Manhattan.

“And Steve [Jobs] and I had to say, ‘No, no, no, no, no. Computers are now going to be in the home. Apple is a good name in the home.’ And so we had to fight to hold it a bit, but it was a good name, and we knew it,” Wozniak says.

So the lesson may be that you shouldn’t always listen to your branding consultant. But the Apple founders knew that their name had really positive connotations, which could be what it’s all about — first impressions.

Twitter’s Dorsey agrees. He says you have two seconds to open the door with the name, and after that, it’s down to the product.

Source: NPR – Naming A Company Right Can Spell Success

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0QuTYYqT7o

Materion Corporation visited the NYSE to celebrate the Company’s name change, to the new Materion brand and stock symbol (NYSE-listed: MTRN). The bell-ringing event highlights the 81-year-old Company’s transformation to a supplier of a diverse range of advanced materials from primarily a metals, mining and specialty metals producer. In honor of the occasion, Richard J. Hipple, Chairman, President and CEO of Materion Corporation, rang The Closing Bell.

The new brand is intended to provide customers better access to, and knowledge of, the Company’s broad scope of products, technologies and value-added services. Products include precious and non-precious specialty metals, inorganic chemicals and powders, specialty coatings, specialty engineered beryllium alloys, beryllium and beryllium composites, and engineered clad and plated metal systems.

Materion Corporation is headquartered in Mayfield Heights, Ohio. The Company, through its wholly-owned subsidiaries, supplies highly engineered advanced enabling materials to global markets. Products include precious and non-precious specialty metals, inorganic chemicals and powders, specialty coatings, specialty engineered beryllium alloys, beryllium and beryllium composites, and engineered clad and plated metal systems.

Brush has changed its name several times since its 1921 founding as Brush Laboratories. But this will be the first incarnation of the company to drop the name that came from Charles F. Brush, the inventor the electric arc light and several other devices that were key in the early days of electric power.

Brush Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer Richard Hipple said the company has a proud heritage but the Brush name doesn’t reflect who they have become as they have developed new technologies.

“As we’ve grown, this is how the customer sees us. Ten different companies, 10 different names, 10 different brands. There was too much confusion over who we are,” Hipple said of the Mayfield Heights company.

Historians may see the Brush name and remember company that developed the first generators for hydro-electric dams and windmills.

Hipple said most of his customers see the Brush name as a company that grew quickly in the 1950s by selling beryllium, an element that’s lighter than aluminum that played key roles in the Mercury-era space capsules and the development of nuclear power plants. Beryllium is also highly toxic and several former employees have sued Brush over the years complaining of lung ailments. Those suits have dropped off sharply since 2001.

Companies still use beryllium in numerous ways from consumer electronics to medical devices, but Hipple said Brush continued to grow in different ways.

In the past decade, it has added divisions that make films used for solar panels and companies that coat steel with protective alloys. After conducting surveys with its customers, the company’s management decided that the Brush name was not helping it sell its diverse product lineup to its customers.

“Attached to that great Brush legacy and heritage was the thought that we are an integrated metals business” that mines, processes and sells beryllium, Hipple said. He added that such the company gets less than 30 percent of its sales from such activities.

Starting in March, he said the Materion name should help inform his customers about the diverse products and services the company can offer.

“We want to reach out to our existing clients and let them know about everything we can do,” Hipple said. “We do that today, but it’s more random than something that’s integrated into the whole organization.”

On March 8, the company’s name will change and its ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange will change to MTRN from BW. Hipple said the company had been preparing to change its name in 2008, but when markets collapsed that year, the Brush decided to put off the change.

Branding experts differ on whether or not a name change is a good idea for the company.

Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern University near Chicago, said few companies change their names after 80 years in business, but such a change could make sense.

“With an old brand name, there’s often a great deal of history, but people aren’t always aware of that history. And that history may not have any bearing on what they’re doing today,” Calkins said.

He added that changing the company’s name will only be the first step. Materion’s marketing department will have to spread the word about the new name. If customers continue to see the same old company with a new logo, they won’t change how they deal with Materion, Calkins added.

Rob Frankel, a branding consultant who has consulted with Disney, Sony and others said that Brush could gain more in the long run by re-investing in its old name.

“One would think that they could leverage the company’s history and more efficiently transition that history into modern-day relevance,” Frankel said. “There is inherent interest, but the story has been neglected and the heritage has been neglected.”

Charles F. Brush may not be as famous as Thomas Edison, Frankel said, but that doesn’t mean the company couldn’t generate that interest in the name.

Electric car company Tesla Motors, for example, named itself for Nikola Tesla, another Edison contemporary who pioneered the early days of electricity.

“Tesla is being rediscovered, 100 years after his death, thanks to that car company,” Frankel said. He added that Brush could do the same, highlighting Charles Brush’s 1888 power-generating windmill to green-energy customers or his electric lights to consumer electronics companies.

Hipple said the company considered doing that, but executives decided that it would take more effort to rehabilitate the company’s historic image than it would take to generate an entirely new one.

“The complexity from the customer standpoint is only going to increase as we continue to grow,” Hipple said. “We had to do this now to address that.”

After the name change, Materion will continue to use the Brush name in some divisions, such as Materion Brush Beryllium and Composites. And the Brush name will remain at Charles F. Brush High School in Lynhdurst where sports teams still use an electric-bolt logo on their uniforms and call themselves the Arcs.

See original article at Cleveland.com

Parker Hannifin Corporation in partnership with Autocar, a manufacturer of commercial vehicles and class 8 trucks, delivered hybrid-powered refuse vehicles that place three South Florida municipalities among the nation’s pioneers in adopting the best technology available to promote cost savings and sustainability in their communities. The new Autocar E3 refuse vehicles feature Parker’s RunWise® advanced series hybrid drive system, which dramatically increases fuel savings and lowers emissions even as it improves drivability and performance.

At its National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Michigan, EPA played a significant role in pioneering hydraulic hybrid technology and partnered with Parker and Autocar in the early testing of these vehicles.

The RunWise advanced series hybrid drive technology performed so well in South Florida field trials last summer that the communities of Hialeah, Miami-Dade County, and the City of Miami chose to upgrade their refuse collection fleets and purchase a total of 11 Autocar E3 trucks with the new RunWise technology. RunWise features proprietary software that allows for seamless shifting and smoother braking, improving drivability.

During a full month of testing in South Florida, the RunWise system registered a 42 percent reduction in fuel consumption, which is equivalent to nearly double the miles per gallon. On an annual basis, the green technology reduces each truck’s carbon footprint by more than 38 tons along routes with frequent stops. In addition, the technology extends the brake life for each truck by up to eight times depending on the duty cycle, resulting in dramatically reduced maintenance costs.

See original article at American Recylcler.

Hydraulic hybrid drive supplier Parker Hannifin and Autocar Truck are moving toward commercial production of Autocar’s Xpeditor E3 with Parker’s fuel-saving RunWise drive next year — 11 pre-production vehicles have just been delivered to three South Florida fleets following a two-route, 2,500-household trial in western Miami-Dade County.

Miami, Miami-Dade, and Hialeah are taking one, six, and four of the trucks, respectively.

RunWise, Parker says, “replaces a refuse truck’s conventional drive train with a series hybrid drive system that marries the variable features of a hydrostatic drive, ideal for urban routes, with the efficient performance of a mechanical drive that performs best at highway speeds… “Fuel consumption is reduced 30% to 50%.”

“These deliveries,” said Parker Hannifin Hydraulics Group president Jeff Cullman, “represent the first commercial use of this technology.”

“It is a very cool technology,” says Vance Zanardelli, energy recovery business unit manager under Cullman.

“We’ve got a system that’s twice as powerful as any of our competitors,” Zanardelli says, the key being “the most efficient pumps in the business.” Parker also claims proprietary software that allows for seamless shifting and smoother braking, improving drivability.

“We’re able to put down significantly more torque off the line,” he told F&F ShowTimes. “Drivers can do whatever they want to do,” he says, and fuel savings have been “pretty con­sistent around the 40% range.”

“This is a no-compromise approach,” Zanardelli says, forecasting a seven-year payback strictly on fuel and maintenance savings. “It’s not something that requires government stimulus.”

“It’s very rare that you get something like this that has a compelling value proposition right out of the box,” he says. “I think it’s going to really change the industry.”

Carbon fiber accumulator shells for the 5,000-psi Parker System are thus far being supplied by Lincoln Composites.

The vehicles for the Florida fleets were supplied by the Palmetto Truck Center in Miami.

The next sales are likely to be in the South Florida area too, says Autocar applications engineering director Mark Neale, noting that his firm and Parker have support personnel located there.

Among them is Doug Yglesias, formerly of Palmetto Truck and now with Parker Hannifin.

Parker notes that the U.S. EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Laboratory in Ann Arbor, Mich. has “played a significant role in pioneering hydraulic hybrid technology and partnered with Parker and Autocar in the early testing of these vehicles.”

Tests of the RunWise hybrid over five years have shown a 45% fuel savings, says Autocar sales VP Cliff Buck, with brake life extended 800 to 900%. Instead of every 90 days, “Now you’re going to be doing a brake job every two and a half years,” he says.

Buck told F&F ShowTimes that the Parker drive is by far the most robust on the market.

An Autocar Xpeditor E3 refuse truck with the Parker Hannifin RunWise hydraulic drive is in today’s ride-and-drive.

Autocar Will Offer CNG-Fueled E3 in 2011

Autocar Trucks will launch a compressed natural gas-fueled version of its Xpeditor E3 with Parker Hannifin RunWise hydraulic hybrid drivetrain in late summer 2011, sales VP Cliff Buck said at the WasteCon 2010 show in Boston last month.

“This time next year, mid-summer, we intend to introduce the hybrid RunWise system on CNG power,” Buck told F&F ShowTimes, and customers, at WasteCon.

CNG emits better than 20% less greenhouse gas than diesel, Buck says. Autocar already claims the lead in Class 8 low cab forward refuse trucks powered by natural gas, as it expects to deliver more than 1,000 such trucks in 2010, approximately double its volume of two years ago.

Original article from “Fleets & Fuels Show Times Blog”

“A lot of people think creativity is…”

Daniel Moneypenny stops himself in mid-sentence.

This happens a lot. Activity just flared in a small part of his right temporal lobe—the anterior superior temporal gyrus, if you want to get medical about it. It’s the sudden spark of insight researchers have identified by a burst of high-frequency activity that occurs about one-third of a second before an idea arrives.

Moneypenny smiles and clicks open his silver briefcase, which is lined by several sticky notes, and removes a black felt-tip pen and a yellow pad. He rapidly scribbles a few words on ruled paper, and then looks up.

“A lot of people think creativity is cerebral and slow,” he continues, “like it’s a linear process that starts out with brainstorming and ends with a couple of interesting options. Forget that! The best creative sessions are rapid-fire and crazy-chaotic. It’s incredible what happens when we let ourselves go in a hundred different directions and take a long while before coming up for air. The key—and the hard part—is to stop filtering ourselves.”

On the yellow pad, Moneypenny has just jotted down a possible new slogan for a billion-dollar global technology firm, which he renamed a few weeks ago. He’s sitting in a suburban Cleveland coffee shop, but this is the kind of guy who really shouldn’t be downing too much caffeine. His revved-up right temporal lobe seems to be in constant overdrive. No exaggeration: He goes through a box of five felt-tip pens a week. His right middle finger has a hardened callous near the tip
from clutching the instruments time and time again since beginning his business in 1977.

COMPETING FOR IDEAS

Moneypenny, 57, is president and chief creative officer of Emaginit, a Silver Lake, OH-based firm that offers naming, branding, positioning and ad campaign services for businesses and their products. His clients range from Fortune 100 firms needing high-level ideation to local mom-and-pop retailers looking for catchy slogans.

Moneypenny has earned the reputation as one of the country’s most creative, prolific and versatile marketers. He recently spearheaded Amway’s branding efforts throughout Europe, Japan and the U.S., and led Diebold’s ATM hardware and software brand launches in 26 countries. During the past couple decades, the words he’s written and refined with his trusty pen and pad have literally meant business for clients ranging from Wendy’s (“We have no arch rival”) to the makers of Pepto Bismol (“This coat’s never out of style”) to FedEx (“We are the overnight success”). Leaders at United Way say Moneypenny’s “Become Someone’s Miracle” campaign generated almost $15 million for the national nonprofit organization.

“Marketing success begins with great ideas, and that’s really what Emaginit competes for,” he says. “The creative concept should be the foundation from which all other promotional elements are executed. It makes no sense for a company to invest time and money in the execution of an inferior concept, because it will inherently result in an inferior final product. That’s why placing a premium on creativity is so important— the best way for marketers and their clients to see eye to eye from the start.”

Moneypenny has believed in that concept since eye makeup helped him launch the firm. In September 1977, while he was a student at the University of Akron, he picked up a women’s magazine and started crafting new headlines for a cosmetic ad he spotted. After coming up with about 30, he showed them to local business owners, some of whom were so impressed that they asked him to work on upcoming marketing projects.

Over the next several years, as companies became larger and ventured into new arenas, many wanted less specific names that wouldn’t pigeonhole them in a particular industry. Marketing firms, and with them the offshoot naming consultants, grew in number and power. To distinguish himself, Moneypenny provides a performance-based guarantee: Clients don’t pay if he doesn’t deliver something they love, or if their preferred choices can’t be trademarked.

He begins many corporate- and product-naming projects by meeting with executives and interviewing them for several hours about their business. His aim is to “drill down to the truth,” he says—a succinct few words that best describe the firm’s mission. Moneypenny leaves the interview with collateral—annual reports, financial statements, marketing pamphlets, product samples, etc.—and later dedicates three five- hour sessions to generating several hundred ideas that speak to the aforementioned truth. For his recent billion-dollar global technology client, the truth statements were, “Cutting-edge materials developed for the future” and “We apply technology to materials.” Those phrases provided the groundwork for Moneypenny’s creative sessions, and he frequently rewrote them as a reminder to himself while creating.

During his creative sessions, Moneypenny some- times begins with a word and dissects it, adding or cutting prefixes and suffixes, playing with Greek and Latin roots, and toying with alliteration and assonance, until ideas begin to flow rapidly.

Moneypenny works alone as a one-person entrepreneurship, which makes staying creatively sharp all the more arduous a task. He overcomes that by collaborating frequently: incessantly calling and emailing trusted cohorts to get their opinions and insight.

Most important, he says, he adheres to self-established rules about creativity. Only when he reaches hundreds of options does he go back through his work and place stars next to the few dozen the client will see in a formal report. Excess ideas are entered into Emaginit’s database, which now holds more than 900,000 branding entities.

TIPS FOR QUICKER CREATIVITY

Creativity is often curtailed by time constraints, client demands, tight budgets, administrative tasks and bad moods. Many experts say it’s inherent and ever-pres- ent, but tends leave when those constraints rule the day.

“Everyone’s creative, but it’s too often squashed by information that’s in the shape of a silo—vertical, defined and limiting,” says Moneypenny, who offers these tips on getting your right temporal lobe firing faster:

Think about the project’s use in the world, not the client. “Don’t think about creating for Joe. Think about how the product or project will live in the marketplace once you finish: Who will need it? Who will touch it? What are those people seeking?”

After you can succinctly state the client’s goal in only a few words, think of as many adjectives as possible that also describe it. One technique is mind mapping: Start with a question or keyword in the center of a blank piece of paper, In a circle around that word, quickly write other words that remind you of the main concept, even if they seem out of place. Then, take those words and do the same thing, extending farther from the center of the page. This free association style might lead to some dead ends, but as one idea sparks another, the exercise should begin to reveal viable solutions.

To be prolific, don’t pontificate. Quantity can beget quality. “A common mistake is to stew over the perfect solution, or to come up with a few good ideas and stop,” Moneypenny notes. “Why limit yourself? When you’re creating, turn absolutely nothing away.”

Surround yourself with 3D visuals, and change them for each client. “I immerse myself in the client’s product and mission, trying to feel their world,” Moneypenny says. “Feel has to come before fact. When you begin, don’t constrain yourself with concepts such as budgets and deadlines. There will be time for that later, but now isn’t the time to hold back.” Some designers say the simplest way to fuel a visual stockpile is to maintain a reference file of raw material such as photographs of city streetscapes, pages culled from magazines, antique print ephemera, sample of work from creatives you admire, fabric swatches, etc. Moneypenny warns that flipping through the same idea- generating sources, such as design annuals or favorite books, is akin to exercising the same muscle group while neglecting others.

Realize that ideas trump syntax until you deliver to the client. “Don’t let grammar get in the way,” he suggests. “The nucleus or nugget is the good idea, not correct English or an exact design color.”

Fear, frustration and fatigue are the biggest creativity-zappers. When the flow of creativity gets clogged, identifying the culprit is the first step in clearing the problem.

Encourage participation. During team brainstorming sessions, employ a “no-kill” rule. Even if a person just rolls his or her eyes at an idea, fewer people are likely to chime in from that point forward.

Get out of your office, and be eclectic. “It’s hard to draw upon your experiences if you don’t have them. Go meet people, and draw upon their energy.” Moneypenny’s experiences include stints as a California forest firefighter, a U.S. Army paratrooper, a fashion model, an antique shop owner, a railroad worker, a Chrysler assembly employee, a cable TV salesperson and a sporting-goods store owner.

When you’re stuck, imagine. What color is the brick of the wall that’s blocking your creativity? Any chips in the mortar? What’s on the other side? Record every- thing you “see” and feel, then go back to thinking about your design problem. Draw any connection between what you felt and your project. Following streams of ideas into unknown destinations is a source of problem-solving.

WORDPLAY TOOLS

Creative writing begets creative thinking, and design- ers staring at a blank screen (or page) can fire up their neurons by playing around with the nuance of language.

To naming, branding and corporate positioning spe- cialists like Daniel Moneypenny, wordplay can lead to serious business. His favorite forms are the pun, a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar-sounding words for humorous effect, and the double entendre, a figure of speech in which a phrase can be understood in either of two ways.

But Moneypenny’s wordplay arsenal extends beyond ones you might remember from high school English. Here’s a list of language tools that could help fire your creative spark:

Antanaclasis—repeating a single word, but with a different meaning each time (“If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.”)

Paronomasia—repetition of a word with a change in letter or sound (“A pun is its own reword.”)

Alliteration—series of words that begin with the same letter or sound alike (Steak ‘n Shake)

Heteronyms—words that are spelled the same but with different pronunciations (“Live in Arizona. Don’t desert the desert!”)

Tmesis—division of the elements of a compound word (“Fan-bloody-tastic!”)

Antithesis—juxtaposition of opposing or contrasting ideas (“In the battle, you’ll tremble.”)

Assonance—the repetition of vowel sounds, most commonly within a short passage of verse (“It’s hot and monotonous.”)

STILL STUCK?

Try transforming your existing idea into a new or modified one, asking yourself these questions:

Adapt? Is there anything else like this? What does this tell you?

Modify? Can you give it a new angle?

Magnify? Can anything be added—time, frequency, height, length, strength?

Minify? Can anything be taken away? Shortened? Lightened? Omitted? Broken up?

Substitute? Can you use different elements? Other material? Another place? Another tone of voice? Someone else?

Rearrange? Swap components? Change the pace or schedule? Transpose cause and effect?

Reverse? Think opposite? Go backward? Reverse roles?

Combine? Blend concepts?

Darin Painter is the owner of Writing Matters in Cleveland. www.writingmatters.com

Download PDF version of this article: HOW Magazine – CREATIVITY • Think Fast! with Daniel Moneypenny

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Right after Commonwealth Industries Inc. and IMCO Recycling Inc. announced their merger in June, company executives devised a contest for their 3,200 employees: Come up with the winning name for the combined entity and win a cash prize.

The new name had to convey the full weight of the big changes that were afoot — the creation of a $2 billion manufacturer and recycler of aluminum and zinc, the melding of corporate cultures and operations. It also had to evoke feelings of starting afresh, which, in a real sense, could involve picking a new city for headquarters.

Several thousand submissions poured in, said Steve Demetriou, chairman and chief executive of the new company. Top executives were having trouble pulling the trigger. So they hired Daniel Moneypenny, a branding consultant who has made his name by naming companies and their products.

Moneypenny worked up a list of 1,150 names in four days, pared it down to 358 and then delivered it to the companies. About a week later they made a decision: Aleris, a combination of “alliance,” “aluminum” and “era.”

So it goes in the corporate name game, a contest populated by characters like Moneypenny who do battle with prefixes and suffixes, morphemes, Greek and Latin roots, linguistics, etymology, alliteration and assonance. Fifty thousand dollars will buy you a manufactured name that has no literal meaning but is designed to channel the quintessence of your corporation.

That’s all well and good. But what exactly is being communicated when so many company names — from Lucent to Livent to Essent — sound alike?

Looking at “Aleris” and its component parts in a vacuum — ignoring for a moment that it’s the name of an aluminum company — might bring to mind Alero, an Oldsmobile car. And the “-is” suffix has been adopted by legions of companies, most recently Novelis Inc., an aluminum spin-off of Alcan Inc. whose North American operations are based in Mayfield Heights.

Strikingly similar to other names, yes. But, as Demetriou put it, ” Aleris’ covered everything we were looking for.”

The merger was completed in early December. Aleris International Inc. was born.

And Demetriou, a former CEO of Brecksville’s Noveon International Inc., announced that the merged corporation, whose predecessor companies were based in Louisville, Ky., and Irving, Texas, would locate in Beachwood.

As for Moneypenny’s effort, Demetriou called it a “very efficient process.”

That efficiency has evolved through years of experience. Moneypenny, 54, has been in the naming and branding business since 1977. His four-person company, Emaginit, of which he’s the president and brains, is based in Silver Lake, north of Akron.

First and foremost, Moneypenny likes to be known as an idea man. And he’s got a lengthy list of companies – from Fortune 500 standards to mom-and-pop shops – who like what he’s selling.

“These things just pour out of my brain,” he said.

Other corporate names he’s sold include Complient, Netliance, Proliance and OnlyOne. Moneypenny-branded products include One Touch tape for Henkel Consumer Adhesives Inc. and Sensa-Trac shocks and struts for Tenneco Automotive Inc. He’s also come up with any number of taglines, such as “Give Your Car the MAACOver!” for MAACO Enterprises Inc.

Moneypenny wouldn’t disclose his annual revenues but said his fee for most projects lands in the $20,000 to $60,000 range. That can add up pretty quickly when you’re a floater like he is, usually working on at least a handful of jobs at any given time.

Starting the process

He starts most naming projects by meeting with corporate executives, pumping them for information about their company or product. He leaves the initial get-together with what he calls “collateral” – annual reports, financial statements, marketing pamphlets, anything that will aid the creative process.

Within days he’s usually ready with hundreds, if not thousands, of names, scribbled out first on yellow legal pads, and then put down cleanly in different fonts in a formal report. On an average day, even if he’s not working on a particular project, he said he tries to come up with about 150 to 200 names.

“I’ve taken attention deficit to a new level,” Moneypenny said.

Out of that pile of appellations, his clients will buy one, maybe a few more. The rest end up in Moneypenny’s database of 600,000-odd names and slogans. That’s the main reason why, beyond creative aptitude, he’s able to churn out names so quickly. Each job he’s hired for throws off reams of material that he can use for later projects.

Some Moneypenny names that are waiting to be purchased include Transera, Cyent and Consortia.

Names get less specific

While those names haven’t found a home yet, consider this brief list of companies – none of them Moneypenny clients – that opted for neologisms: Infosys, Unisys, Agilysys, Agilent, Aquilent, Consilient, Telegent, Omnova, Acteva and Advantia.

How many of those can you identify with their lines of business? Time was, you could tell what a company did by its name: Think International Business Machines, International Harvester, General Motors, General Mills.

The reasons behind the naming shift are clear. As companies became larger and ventured into new areas, sometimes becoming conglomerates in the process, they wanted less specific names that wouldn’t pigeonhole them in a particular industry. Marketing firms, and with them the offshoot naming consultants, grew in number and power, making naming a kind of pseudo-professional vocation.

Add to the mix the incredible pressures, which have only increased with time, of trademarking and finding available Internet addresses. Oftentimes the only way to clear trademark is to make something up.

Steve Rivkin, a naming consultant in Glen Rock, N.J., and co-author of “The Making of a Name,” said that more than 3,000 new trademark applications are added each week to the 3.8 million registered, pending and inactive trademarks already on file in the United States. In total, there are more than 14 million names of U.S. corporations and businesses. And that doesn’t touch names and trademarks in other countries, which are a factor for firms doing business globally.

“That creates a pretty high hurdle for companies trying to come up with something that actually works,” Rivkin said.

Naseem Javed, president of naming company ABC Namebank International in New York, said the history of naming can be broken down into several “mega-cycles”: from long names, like International Business Machines, to shortened or initialized names, to fabricated names that drew on geographical landmarks, zodiac signs, mythology and the like.

Then, he said, when the 1990s Internet boom arrived, the process devolved into a mess of names that “you couldn’t spell, remember or pronounce.”

“They would take a color, say, purple, and all of a sudden you’d have a company called Purple Dog or Purple Frog or Purple Martini,” Javed said. Survivors of that era include Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc.

Since the bubble burst, naming has become a more somber affair, leading to an exponential rise in the number of antiseptic “coined” names, the kind that don’t carry any meaning by themselves.

The challenge with that kind of name is getting your message across, said W. Benoy Joseph, professor of marketing at Cleveland State University’s James J. Nance College of Business Administration.

“They’re hoping that through sheer promotion and repetition of the name that their target audiences, whether buyers, consumers or investors, will eventually learn what it is that they do,” Joseph said.

Rivals grade ‘Aleris’

Danny Altman, in his office near San Francisco, which is probably home to more naming companies than any other U.S. city, has no trouble rattling off a string of complaints about coined names. He’s creative director for A Hundred Monkeys, a naming firm whose calling card is irreverence; some company names they’ve sold include Alfalfa, Calabash, Chuckwalla and Jamcracker.

The problem with most coined names, he said, is that they’re made by committee. “What usually happens is that the names that have any interesting texture or meaning, the ones that stick out, are the ones that get knocked off the table first. There’s a tendency to come up with something that no one can object to.”

Naming firms often have similar sets of rules: The name should grab you, easily impart its meaning and communicate the personality of the company. But despite their common goals, or perhaps because of them, they can be unusually cruel to their competitors.

The reaction to Aleris fell a tad short of cordiality. Altman called it “just another of these anonymous corporate names that don’t carry any meaning, don’t carry any emotional impact. It’s got a little bit of poetry, a reasonably nice sound to it, but it doesn’t make anyone smile.”

Javed, of ABC Namebank, whose creations include Telus and Celestica, said Aleris “sounds like some kind of disease or an allergy.”

George Frazier, a partner with the naming firm Idiom in San Francisco and one of the minds behind Imaginova, Predicant and Encysive, said he could only conclude that Aleris’ creators “wanted intentionally to be neutral or bland. It’s phonetically soft, not strong at all.”

It’s a cutthroat business, and everyone’s got an opinion. Moneypenny, for his part, said he can take the criticism.

“I consider it almost a compliment in a way,” he said. “What matters to me is that my client likes the name, and the board at Aleris loves it. I don’t want to think about what other branding firms think about me.”

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

cmontgomery@plaind.com, 216-999-4059
© 2005 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.

Friday, December 10, 2004
Christopher Montgomery
Plain Dealer Reporter

Cuyahoga County will soon gain the headquarters of a $2 billion public company, an important win for a region that has lost a number of high-profile corporate headquarters in recent years.

The home office of aluminum fabricator and recycler Aleris International Inc. is expected to employ 100 people, with an average salary of $60,000, within three years. A site hasn’t been announced yet, but Beachwood is a strong contender.

The deal includes the return of a set of familiar faces. Four of Aleris’ top executives were at the helm of Brecksville’s Noveon International Inc. when it was bought by Wickliffe’s Lubrizol Corp. last summer.

Aleris is the result of a merger that closed Thursday between IMCO Recycling Inc., of Irving, Texas, and Commonwealth Industries Inc., of Louisville, Ky.

The marriage of IMCO, one of the largest recyclers of aluminum and zinc, and Commonwealth, a leading maker of aluminum sheet, created a company with more than $2 billion in annual sales, 3,200 employees and 29 production facilities worldwide.

Both companies were public, and Aleris will start trading today as ARS on the New York Stock Exchange.

Aleris Chairman and Chief Executive Steve Demetriou said in an interview that moving to Northeast Ohio , instead of consolidating elsewhere, made the most business sense.

“First and foremost, it’s a great place to have a headquarters,” Demetriou said. “We also see this as a central location with regard to our key customers and suppliers.

“And somewhere down the list of input was the fact that several of us who now lead the combined company all live here.”

Demetriou was president and CEO of specialty chemical maker Noveon from 2001 to June of this year, when Lubrizol completed its acquisition. He joined Commonwealth, which he had served as a board member for two years, as its president and chief executive officer after leaving Noveon.

Commonwealth and IMCO announced their merger around the time Demetriou took over at Commonwealth, and he was asked by the boards of both companies to run Aleris. Demetriou brought with him three top Noveon executives — Chief Financial Officer Mike Friday, Treasurer Sean Stack and general counsel Chris Clegg.

Team NEO, a regional economic development organization, helped coordinate an incentive package to lure Aleris to the area. It includes a state job creation tax credit of up to $950,000, a low-interest $400,000 loan from Cuyahoga County and a grant from the Greater Cleveland Partnership, details of which haven’t been released.

Bob Farley, president of Team NEO, said it helped that Aleris’ top executives already lived in Greater Cleveland, “but we had to work for it. It wasn’t just a gimme.” Aleris hasn’t disclosed which sites it’s considering, but all of them are in Cuyahoga County, Farley said.

Thomas Sudow, executive director of the Beachwood Chamber of Commerce, said that his city is in the running and that he’s “very hopeful.”

“The best part of this is that we aren’t just reshuffling the deck on the Titanic. They’re coming in from the outside,” Sudow said. “It’s not good for the region to just move something from Beachwood to Westlake.”

Demetriou said he expects to make an announcement on the headquarters site sometime in the next few days.

The new company already has a minor presence in the region — Commonwealth’s aluminum coating plant in Bedford and IMCO’s aluminum facility in Elyria.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

cmontgomery@plaind.com, 216-999-4059
© 2004 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission.

“When a company is looking to go to market with a product or service and they need naming, ad campaigns and positioning, and can’t wait months, weeks or even days for results, Ideon provides efficient turnaround in one day,” said Daniel Moneypenny, president and chief creative officer of Emaginit.

Through his twenty-five years of working with Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies on naming, branding and positioning, Moneypenny has honed his creative talents to provide clients with marketable and memorable brands.

Emaginit is expanding with Ideon for those clients who require quick return on imagination and do not require the in-depth analysis or competitive research, which Moneypenny provides with his other creative services.

When Ideon is called, the client gives a quick download of what the product or service objectives are and the symmetry of them to the other aspects of the company. Moneypenny conducts a 1-2 hour interview with a detailed list of ten questions. Taking these answers, Daniel stays at the company’s site and articulates 25-50 positioning statements and or names, that the client then decides if these will be used for branding, marketing, advertising or other venues.

“I like to call this Ideon process, pure creativity with a shot of adrenalin,” said Moneypenny. “As with all of my other projects, the client does not owe me one cent if there is not 100% satisfaction for the work I delivered.”

Daniel Moneypenny’s clients have included Amway Corporation, Coke USA, Dow AgroSciences, Federal Express, Procter & Gamble, Roche′ and Wal-Mart just to name a few. To get more information on Moneypenny, Ideon, Emaginit his clients, his imagination and his expertise go to www.justemaginit.com

For additional information and interview scheduling, call Nancy M. Valent at 216-513-8740.