What's In A Name?
Back in the days Hollywood marketers were determined to create stars and part of that usually involved giving up your name and creating a new one. More commonly known were the transitions of Norma Jean Baker becoming Marilyn Monroe and Bernie Schwartz becoming Tony Curtis. But what to do about Leonard Slye or William Henry Pratt or Dino Crocetti? (they were turned into Roy Rogers, Boris Karloff and Dean Martin, respectively). Or Nathan Birnbaum, Joseph Yule, Jr., Archie Leach, Marion Morrison, and Frederick Austerlitz, actors whose birth names were forgettable but destined to be remembered only by their stage names of George Burns, Mickey Rooney, Cary Grant, John Wayne and Fred Astaire. Many, such as Leslie Hope and Harry Crosby only had to change part of their names, while others such as England's James Stewart found their name already taken (he soon changed his name to Stewart Granger). Others were simply too complicated to pronounce: Tula Ellice Finklea (Cyd Cherisse), Issur Danielovitch (Kirk Douglas) and Benny Kubelsky (Jack Benny). The practice seems to have died down a bit, limited to a few making only minor changes (William Bradley Pitt and Emily Jean Stone might be the most recognizable), but a few have stuck to the traditional Hollywood practice of changing their names to a catchier stage name with birth-names such as Alecia Beth Moore (Pink), Erin Marlon Bishop (Jamie Foxx), and Peter Gene Hernandez (Bruno Mars).
Changing a birth name is actually rather easy and often quickly and legally approved by courts. But if you're a company, the process gets a bit more difficult. Consider the corporate giant Nestle, now the world's largest food and beverage corporation. Personally, I can still remember their childhood jingle of "N-E-S-T-L-E-S, Nestle's Make the Very Best...Chocolate." Overseas you might remember the company more for their adverts for another of their products, Nescafe. But expanding far beyond simple chocolate and instant coffee (as but one example, Nestle owns 51 different brands of bottled water, including Hepar, Arrowhead, Perrier, S. Pellegrino, and Pure Life among others*), acquiring and keeping a name is almost as difficult as getting or creating your name to become a brand. Back off even a tiny amount and your "brand name" becomes almost generic and hard to defend against rival users (Google, for example, just became listed as a verb in the lexicons of many dictionaries; and in a bit of trivia it was Bill Gates who told the founders that their original shade of yellow for one of their "letters" was off-putting and should be changed, which Google quickly did); picture how often you might accidentally use what are otherwise brand names when talking about or asking for something: Styrofoam, Xerox, Scotch Tape, Velcro, Kleenex, Jet Ski, and a slew of others.
Add to this that for some reason I noticed a few short pieces on philosophers and theorists and what caught my eye was that many of them had perished as they entered their 60s,** including Aristotle (62), Adam Smith (67), John Maynard Keynes (62), Karl Marx (65)...on a curious aside, Marx, who railed against capitalism, was able to do his writings largely due to lifelong financial support from his rather wealthy friend and initial co-author, Friedrich Engels. Okay, I'm veering off a bit (perhaps because I wanted to throw in the footnote about this at the bottom)...but with my personal eating habits leaning toward alt-meat products, I couldn't help but notice how more and more products were making their way to grocery shelves. Many of these new entries were competing with the larger names such as Morningstar Farms (now owned by Kellogg's), Gardein (bought out by Pinnacle) and the British fungal entry, Quorn; and a few new entries had arrived earlier (notably, an effort to promote the abundant jackfruit) but then came an article in the recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek showing that there were far more than just a few new entrants, some with names such as Fora and Numu and Ocean Hugger and using everything from pea protein (now in many grain-free pet food products) to tomatoes, algae, and coconut oil to make their meat-free products (the latter is used to make a version of mozzarella cheese).
Fortune magazine featured an issue titled "Make the World Great Again," perhaps in deference (or in a sarcastic nod) to the current U.S. president; but its subtitle was more appropriately titled, "2018 Change the World Issue" (if you were the editor and had the final say, which cover title would you have chosen?). What I found interesting about the issue was that many large companies, perhaps because of (or despite of) their reputations were actively spending rather large sums to make global changes. Take the mammoth company of McDonald's with its 37,000+ restaurants (Starbucks has about 10,000 fewer stores, while Apple and Ikea both have about 1/100th those numbers). Make a change in corporate policy there and it reverberates; but the chain's decision to cut its greenhouse gas footprint by a third in the next 10+ years will be equal to removing 32 million cars from the highways; add to that that in just over 5 years, says the article, "all of its customer packaging will come from renewable, recycled, or certified-sustainable sources, and the company's goal is to recycle it all in its own restaurants." The grocery chain Kroger (3rd largest in the world) is working to "eliminate internal waste by 2025" and last year donated the equivalent of 325 million meals in an effort to eradicate hunger (its goal is to reach 3 billion such meals). The Brazilian petrochemical giant Braskem has developed a polyethylene plastic made from sugarcane, an end-product already in use making bread bags, milk bottles and yes, some Lego toys.
But it's not all the big companies, for many smaller groups and even many unrecognized individuals are making quite the difference as well. Penta told the story of GAIA, "a U.S.-based global alliance of nongovernmental organizations and grassroots groups focused on waste reduction and recycling," and how the group began its initiative of Zero Waste Cities. In the test city of Tacloban in the Philippines, 128 tons of trash piled up daily, and that was after 30% of waste had already been collected for recycling. Said the article: Today, villagers and volunteers from Mother Earth Foundation, a GAIA member, collect plastic, food scraps to compost, and other materials to recycle, as well as "residuals" --often unrecyclable plastic-- to analyze and landfill...The results in Tacloban were amazing: 100% of the city's waste is being collected, and the city has cut the amount of waste going to landfills because more of it --129 tons a day-- is composted and recycled. The transformation was simple, with only one education session per household, says Froilan Grate, a regional coordinator for GAIA Asia Pacific. Within a month, 90% of the residents complied. "If you give people the right information and the right tools, you never encounter a problem," Grate says. Or take Jack and Laura Dangermond, two people you may have never heard of but who donated "one of the last large, privately owned and still-undeveloped coastal tracts in Southern California, making it a rarity amid one of the country’s most expensive real estate markets." In a stunning gift, even for a group such as the Nature Conservancy, the Dangermonds purchased the property from an investment company (which had the winning bid when the property first came up for sale 10 years ago), this being land where people such as Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres would each plunk down $29 million and more for nearby land to build another of their homes. In other words, the real estate market was hot, even without the fires that gutted nearby properties. But the Dangermonds shared a vision of protecting one of the last remaining stretches of California's coast...and thus, donated their newly acquired property to the Nature Conservancy (the full story, worth reading, appears in their magazine).
There is a lot to be said for keeping a name, or changing a name, or making a name. For some companies and some people, a name is a brand, one which it is felt expresses more of what or who they are or want to be. Some names are quite memorable and many more are quickly forgotten (for those of you in the U.S., how many Secretaries of the Treasury would you be able to name, this despite their being the chief financial officer of the entire United States...one hint: the first secretary is now the subject of a long-running Broadway play). And for many of us, the name given us at birth is just fine. Some people, some brands, some companies make it (one has to ask, why the name Google?)...and others, well, fade away into the sunset. There is no right or wrong here...some names will far outlive their owners, perhaps as a bank or foundation or trust. And others, such as the Dangermonds, will quietly vanish...but not without the gratitude of the world.
*Despite all of their water brands, Nestle --the world's largest owner of bottled water-- represents just under 12% of marketed brands of bottled water, which might give you an idea of the amount of plastic and glass used to bottle and market these products; one site called Ban the Bottle presents the cost of this just to your pocketbook: The recommended eight glasses of water a day, at U.S. tap rates equals about $.49 per year; that same amount of bottled water is about $1,400. Said Forbes last year, we now globally purchase one million bottles each minute and toss out 91% of them. On a somewhat related note, the company Adidas now makes a running shoe out of those recycled bottles, each pair of shoes using the equivalent of approximately 11 such bottles which were discarded and later recovered from ocean waters; while the shoes are priced between $160 and $200, the company has already sold over a million pairs...Adidas is also a founding member of Parley for the Oceans, a collaborative organization intent on "protecting the seas" (they also make products such as hoodies and soccer kits from the recycled plastic).
**60 years of age is also about the average lifespan for peoples of the DRC or Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country which still ranked near the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index as of 2015 and a country where much of the population still doesn't have electricity or running water. What makes this so ironic is that much of the rest of the world is dependent on this country because of our cell phones...DRC provides 2/3 of the mineral cobalt, an essential ingredient for both electric cars and our phones, and a product often dug out and harvested with child labor. A more in-depth report appeared in Fortune (which, perhaps even more ironically, you could pull up and view on your cell phone).
Changing a birth name is actually rather easy and often quickly and legally approved by courts. But if you're a company, the process gets a bit more difficult. Consider the corporate giant Nestle, now the world's largest food and beverage corporation. Personally, I can still remember their childhood jingle of "N-E-S-T-L-E-S, Nestle's Make the Very Best...Chocolate." Overseas you might remember the company more for their adverts for another of their products, Nescafe. But expanding far beyond simple chocolate and instant coffee (as but one example, Nestle owns 51 different brands of bottled water, including Hepar, Arrowhead, Perrier, S. Pellegrino, and Pure Life among others*), acquiring and keeping a name is almost as difficult as getting or creating your name to become a brand. Back off even a tiny amount and your "brand name" becomes almost generic and hard to defend against rival users (Google, for example, just became listed as a verb in the lexicons of many dictionaries; and in a bit of trivia it was Bill Gates who told the founders that their original shade of yellow for one of their "letters" was off-putting and should be changed, which Google quickly did); picture how often you might accidentally use what are otherwise brand names when talking about or asking for something: Styrofoam, Xerox, Scotch Tape, Velcro, Kleenex, Jet Ski, and a slew of others.
Add to this that for some reason I noticed a few short pieces on philosophers and theorists and what caught my eye was that many of them had perished as they entered their 60s,** including Aristotle (62), Adam Smith (67), John Maynard Keynes (62), Karl Marx (65)...on a curious aside, Marx, who railed against capitalism, was able to do his writings largely due to lifelong financial support from his rather wealthy friend and initial co-author, Friedrich Engels. Okay, I'm veering off a bit (perhaps because I wanted to throw in the footnote about this at the bottom)...but with my personal eating habits leaning toward alt-meat products, I couldn't help but notice how more and more products were making their way to grocery shelves. Many of these new entries were competing with the larger names such as Morningstar Farms (now owned by Kellogg's), Gardein (bought out by Pinnacle) and the British fungal entry, Quorn; and a few new entries had arrived earlier (notably, an effort to promote the abundant jackfruit) but then came an article in the recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek showing that there were far more than just a few new entrants, some with names such as Fora and Numu and Ocean Hugger and using everything from pea protein (now in many grain-free pet food products) to tomatoes, algae, and coconut oil to make their meat-free products (the latter is used to make a version of mozzarella cheese).
Fortune magazine featured an issue titled "Make the World Great Again," perhaps in deference (or in a sarcastic nod) to the current U.S. president; but its subtitle was more appropriately titled, "2018 Change the World Issue" (if you were the editor and had the final say, which cover title would you have chosen?). What I found interesting about the issue was that many large companies, perhaps because of (or despite of) their reputations were actively spending rather large sums to make global changes. Take the mammoth company of McDonald's with its 37,000+ restaurants (Starbucks has about 10,000 fewer stores, while Apple and Ikea both have about 1/100th those numbers). Make a change in corporate policy there and it reverberates; but the chain's decision to cut its greenhouse gas footprint by a third in the next 10+ years will be equal to removing 32 million cars from the highways; add to that that in just over 5 years, says the article, "all of its customer packaging will come from renewable, recycled, or certified-sustainable sources, and the company's goal is to recycle it all in its own restaurants." The grocery chain Kroger (3rd largest in the world) is working to "eliminate internal waste by 2025" and last year donated the equivalent of 325 million meals in an effort to eradicate hunger (its goal is to reach 3 billion such meals). The Brazilian petrochemical giant Braskem has developed a polyethylene plastic made from sugarcane, an end-product already in use making bread bags, milk bottles and yes, some Lego toys.
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| A portion of the 26,000+ California acres donated to the Nature Conservancy |
There is a lot to be said for keeping a name, or changing a name, or making a name. For some companies and some people, a name is a brand, one which it is felt expresses more of what or who they are or want to be. Some names are quite memorable and many more are quickly forgotten (for those of you in the U.S., how many Secretaries of the Treasury would you be able to name, this despite their being the chief financial officer of the entire United States...one hint: the first secretary is now the subject of a long-running Broadway play). And for many of us, the name given us at birth is just fine. Some people, some brands, some companies make it (one has to ask, why the name Google?)...and others, well, fade away into the sunset. There is no right or wrong here...some names will far outlive their owners, perhaps as a bank or foundation or trust. And others, such as the Dangermonds, will quietly vanish...but not without the gratitude of the world.
*Despite all of their water brands, Nestle --the world's largest owner of bottled water-- represents just under 12% of marketed brands of bottled water, which might give you an idea of the amount of plastic and glass used to bottle and market these products; one site called Ban the Bottle presents the cost of this just to your pocketbook: The recommended eight glasses of water a day, at U.S. tap rates equals about $.49 per year; that same amount of bottled water is about $1,400. Said Forbes last year, we now globally purchase one million bottles each minute and toss out 91% of them. On a somewhat related note, the company Adidas now makes a running shoe out of those recycled bottles, each pair of shoes using the equivalent of approximately 11 such bottles which were discarded and later recovered from ocean waters; while the shoes are priced between $160 and $200, the company has already sold over a million pairs...Adidas is also a founding member of Parley for the Oceans, a collaborative organization intent on "protecting the seas" (they also make products such as hoodies and soccer kits from the recycled plastic).
**60 years of age is also about the average lifespan for peoples of the DRC or Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country which still ranked near the bottom of the UN's Human Development Index as of 2015 and a country where much of the population still doesn't have electricity or running water. What makes this so ironic is that much of the rest of the world is dependent on this country because of our cell phones...DRC provides 2/3 of the mineral cobalt, an essential ingredient for both electric cars and our phones, and a product often dug out and harvested with child labor. A more in-depth report appeared in Fortune (which, perhaps even more ironically, you could pull up and view on your cell phone).
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