Branding senn-VAY-oh

Print Action, May 2004 by Robinson, Jon

Ten months ago, when Paul Reilly, Mail-Well's president, CEO, and chairman, interviewed Kathy Hedin for the director of communications position, he told her the company was about to change its name. He didn't tell her what the name was going to be, but during the first week at her new job, Hedin would come to represent the office of the CEO on the branding team that would transition Mail-Well's billion-dollar business onto a completely new brand. PrintAction reached Hedin in Colorado to discuss Cenveo and branding.

Jon Robinson: I read that the Cenveo name and logo are derived from the syllables "Cen" as center and "Veo" which relates to vision and understanding. Is there more to the story of where this name came from?

Kathy Hedin: It is a derived name but about two years ago Mail-Well started with a professional brand-naming firm to help develop the new name.

Cenveo was chosen from over a thousand name alternatives, so I guess there was a long, long list. I never saw it but it was culled down to Cenveo when I came on board. There was no existing literal name that fit everything we do. Perhaps with one exception.

We have several locations that go by the name GAC, which stands for Graphic Arts Center, and that might have worked but we could not own that name in all 50 states and Canada. At the same time we were doing a parallel effort and looking at names that we can own and really create what that name means to our customers. That is how Cenveo was born.

The sunburst, the red green and blue ball, their proximity to one another, what is going on there?

Think about it as the hub, the centre, and the dots are aligning with the bays to give a sense of forward motion. You see three dots around this hub and they signify our people, ideas and resources coming together to create a customized solution.

Was there ever any concern about the pronunciation of the name?

As we tested it, and heard people say it, we were very comfortable. The name is going to become what we make of it. Kinko's is easy to say but, early on did people wonder what products or services they sold? Putting the meaning behind the name is really important to us.

Cenveo is kind of an arbitrary corporate name that doesn't strike any immediacy about what market you are in. Was this an issue?

Really, the name Mail-Well did not serve us well if you talk to our salespeople. Many of them worked for locations that did not call themselves Mail-Well and they said Mail-Well didn't really say what we do, especially if you are in the graphic communications area.

When we did our research with our customers we actually tested Cenveo and our tagline, Vision Delivered, with customers and we asked them, given the choices of investor/financial services or graphic arts/visual communications or wireless communications, where would you put Cenveo? More than 48 per cent put us into the graphic arts/visual communications area. So what Cenveo gives us is an umbrella to position everything that we do for our customers more broadly than Mail-Well ever could.

Still there must have been some fear in abandoning the Mail-Well name? Paul Reilly once told me that he probably would only get to change a company's name once in his career, so he was going to do it right. So it wasn't so much a fear of losing Mail-Well. It was a concern and desire to do this right. There has been research done the entire way: testing the name linguistically, testing the name with customers, and testing the name with salespeople. By mid-summer, every location on the commercial side will be Cenveo. The signs will go up.

Why completely rename a billion-dollar company that has had such a longstanding in the printing industry?

Well, you have to remember that we are a roll-up company and about two years ago there was a desire to unite all of our 10,000 employees under one name. You may think we are just called Mail-Well but we do business under 30 different names today. And this really reflects our strategy to become one company in all that we do.

Did the move have anything to do with no longer being seen simply as a printing company by customers?

We have done customer satisfaction surveys and the results of last year's indicated that customers know us based on what they buy from us today. If they buy envelopes they know us as an envelope manufacturer, in commercial printing they think we are only a printer, and so on.

And today customers are really driving us to be more like one with them, in that they are reducing their number of suppliers to reduce the costs of their business. We need to build one brand instead of 33 brands which really tells the whole story of what we can do for the customer.

It seems there are some companies that are trying to distance themselves, so to speak, from being known in the investment community as a printing company. How did this factor in as motivation for the name change?

The investment community is pretty close to us and sees us as one company, as a company that may have been Mail-Well one day and is now Cenveo. Where they are interested and where we can drive this name is with the next shift in the technology wave that is now happening. There is a real mega-trend in leveraging technology to deliver more one-to-one printing, using Customer Relationship Management to help our customers be more direct and helpful to their customers. I think that is probably where investors will be interested in how this all rolls forward.