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In the oil business, "upstream" means finding and pumping the stuff — "downstream" means refining and selling it. This rebranding enables the separation of Marathon Oil Corporation's up and downstream businesses, by spinout of its downstream business as "Marathon Petroleum Corporation."  According to Wikipedia, "The split was expected by Marathon executives to allow Marathon Petroleum Company to focus more directly on refining, pipeline and marketing portfolio enrichment while exposing each individual company as a possible takeover target." The parts, in other words, may be worth more than the whole, freed whether to sell themselves or to grow more quickly.

Marathon leaders decided to retain the formal corporate name "Marathon Oil," in effect elevating it to the level of communicative name by adding "Oil" to the new logo. (Note: the Matrix acknowledges this as a use of the Formal or Legal name tool,  to express a new vision while preserving existing Marathon equity, rather than as a change of communicative name.) 

A new visual identity would be required too, to differentiate Marathon Oil visually from Marathon Petroleum, which would logically retain the heritage "M" logo that marks its 5,100 retail service stations. To design this separation of "Oil" and "Petroleum" corporations, Marathon turned to the Houston-based agency BrandExtract (who had managed its Web presence for over a decade).  BrandExtract conducted a comprehensive survey of employee dreams and values, and happily, employees and their leaders were pretty well on the same page in choosing the eight defining brand attributes that would guide design... "nimble, driven, focused, innovative, energetic, socially responsible, global and ethical."

The designers felt that addition of a new and different symbol would be the best way to suggest these attributes, and to show that Marathon Oil is a new and different Marathon — thus the "energy wave" symbol (in clean, unpolluted colors).  The resulting logo, a symbol-enhanced wordmark, must be defined as primarily a wordmark (in which "Oil" expresses the narrowed upstream focus); the designers took care to make the symbol subordinate to the name.

The new "energy wave" symbol is the source of the visual tools (curves, colors) then used (along with typography) to construct the new corporate visual system which can be seen at www.marathonoil.com.

Consistent with its upstream focus, the "Oil" company chose to keep its Houston HQ location (and Houston's relatively global orientation), while the more regional downstream Petroleum company will now be led from its historic regional base in Findlay, Ohio. (This qualifies as a use of the HQ Location tool by the spin-out, rather than by the surviving parent.)

Marathon Oil now communicates three defining segments (Exploration & Production, Oil Sands Mining, Integrated Gas) in place of four.  Units will sign themselves monolithically, under the new corporate mark.

The June 30, 2011 identity launch was staged for high employee impact (great care had been taken to maintain design secrecy), including Web site conversion (July 1), videos emphasizing employee engagement, and large-format print ads in community and national newspapers.

Design by BrandExtract

Submitted by: Tony Spaeth, 14/07/2011
Status: Estimated by Tony Spaeth
Category: Oil & Gas Producers
Country (HQ): United States