Martin Marietta Rebrand
Our seventh 20-year retrospective discusses our re-brand of the second largest aggregate business in North America, Martin Marietta
Back in 2014, we were approached by our partners in North America, G&S Business Communications, to help with their re-positioning and re-branding of leading aggregate business Martin Marietta Materials.
Formed in 1961 when the American Marietta Corporation merged with the Glenn L. Martin Corporation, Martin Marietta had grown through significant acquisitions and mergers into one of North America’s leading aggregate businesses. Their acquisition of TXI in 2014 prompted a re-positioning and re-branding of their business.
With such an auspicious client, we wanted to create a new brand identity, logo and icon that had value and meaning for the business, its employees and customers. Working with G&S, we interviewed a broad cross-section of employees and stakeholders to gain a better insight into the business and its values; we discovered a sincere and very genuine passion and engagement throughout the business. Employees cared about Martin Marietta, which was reciprocated back from the business; strength of heritage, community and relationships were also extremely important. This gave our joint team some very strong core values to work with.
We wanted to capture the brand’s heritage by retaining some of the equity from its existing logo. The existing marque featured two M’s, one on top of the other, so we retained a similar design in the new identity but had them overlap to create a mountainous landscape of aggregate piles. In doing so, serendipity formed a hidden diamond shape in the overlap. We’d been seeking something in our design that would reflect the passion that Martin Marietta’s people had for the business, and the diamond was perfect; formed over thousands of years from compressed earth, highly valuable, extremely strong, and something people were passionate about the diamond reflected the values we wanted to convey in our new design.
Everyone was thrilled with the new design; it captured everything Martin Marietta wanted to say about its business, people and values. For a design agency, this reaction to our work goes far beyond any form of remuneration for our services, this type of feedback creates confidence and builds backbone. Our favourite response, though, came from Steve Halsey, Chief Growth Officer at G&S, when he called us from his Taxi in Dallas to say he’d just seen a fleet of Martin Marietta cement trucks adorned with our design driving down the highway on their way to deliver cement. The photo he sent, now sadly lost in our archives, was of a line of immense Kenworth trucks, travelling in convoy spinning branded blue, white and charcoal drums.
We’ve re-branded businesses worldwide, but some re-brands still make us excited and proud when we look back on our work. Martin Marietta is one of those, and for this article, we looked online at where they are today. We were pleased to see how the brand has evolved but also retained the brand guidelines we set all those years ago; it just goes to show the strength, character, passion, and respect Martin Marietta has for its business and brand eight years down the line.
Thank you, Martin Marietta!
If you’d like us to dig into your brand and create a gem of a new identity then…