MWM: A Valuable Brand

A Special MWM Moment of Aljoscha Kertesz

Since I joined the company in 2012, I have experienced many pleasant and remarkable moments. One of these moments happened in 2013. At the time, MWM had already been part of the Caterpillar Group for two years. Following an “integration light” phase, the renaming took place in order to underline the affiliation of our business unit with the parent group. On November 1, 2013, our company was thus renamed Caterpillar Energy Solutions GmbH.

Nevertheless, the well-established MWM brand was to be retained. Products of both brands, i.e. MWM and Cat, are manufactured in Mannheim, Germany. Before long, it became obvious that the international development teams from Germany, the USA, and meanwhile also from India combine the best from two worlds, delivering efficiency and quality to the customer.

Still, there were fears that due to the renaming, the traditional MWM brand could get lost forever between the pages of dusty history books. So now, there was a need for internal communication. In the course of the communication about the needed change, a strong signal was to be set within the company to engage the employees on the path that had been chosen.

Thus, I came up with the idea of creating something valuable that would demonstrate the continued existence of the brand in a tangible way, namely by means of a silver medal showing the Cat logo on one side and the MWM logo on the other. In this way, the MWM brand was presented as something valuable, something that would symbolize its continuation alongside the flagship brand Cat. “Two strong sides of a medal” was the slogan we used in the internal communication.

The medal was minted in pure silver and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. All colleagues at Caterpillar Energy Solutions received a medal along with a personal letter from Willy Schumacher, the then Managing Director. Small, elegant, and precious! That was just the right concept for a silver medal, which my marketing colleague Sven-Markus Lösch had proposed instead of a larger medal with a lower silver content. And indeed, its material value has gone up by 45 percent since its issue.

10 years later, it is obvious that the statements made by the management are still valid: MWM is a strong brand that occupies an important place in Caterpillar’s portfolio. The products manufactured in Mannheim under the MWM and Cat brands are making a valuable contribution to the sustainable rollout of the energy transition.