MartinFederal has been in business for over 15 years. But with most of their work conducted outside of Huntsville, MartinFederal has lacked the ability to build the local brand awareness they seek. The company’s leadership was looking for the opportunity to better shape the brand to make it more prominent.
But first, in order to understand what potential the brand could have, the company needed to fully analyze its current awareness and position in the market.
Our approach started with a full internal discovery dive that included conversations with both senior level leaders at the company and additional team members from different departments. This allowed us to create a well-rounded perception of where the company currently stood according to its people.
Then, we pivoted to analyzing how the MartinFederal brand stood in the local market. Our team conducted a series of focus groups to gain real insights into how the refined target audience viewed the company. We ran several controlled focus groups with participants in the following demographics: Students, Local Business Professionals, and Industry Peers.
The results from the focus groups gave our team insight into a critical piece of how the company was being perceived. The ‘Federal’ in MartinFederal sounded like a local bank and additionally, the logo had an older corporate look that further emphasized a ‘bank’ persona. The brand needed a visual refresh.
We nixed the federal from the name and shortened it to MartinFed, which allowed the company to maintain the name recognition among their current customers.
With a new logo refresh, it was time to move on to the digital experience. High-fidelity wireframes allowed us to make structural and user experience recommendations earlier on in the process, starting important conversations before diving into visual design. For MartinFed, we wanted to make sure the site was future-proof and was built in a way that allowed their team to make future updates.
After narrowing down potential aesthetic directions, the MartinFed team choose to go with a darker toned website – a modern contrast to the previous site that used industry standard colors and content arrangements. By going out of their comfort zone, MartinFed was able to collaborate with our team to create something unique to their industry.
