TL;DR: Brand Refresh & Website Design Begins, Agencies Being Brought Onboard, Social Media Audit Begins, Prep for Comms & Media Training Workshop (leveling up!), Finalize Messaging, Outline Content Strategy, Begin Growth Campaigns, Focusing On The Why and Go-To-Market.
The Leadership team recently shared an extensive 2021 Go-To-Market Strategy deck at the All Hands and this deck is what we’ve been using to navigate our marketing deliverables in Q1. We believe how a brand is perceived affects its success. This is why in 2021 Q1 we have focused on addressing major pain points around having a polarizing brand (ex. rainbows and NEARkats), broken funnels on the website (ex. hard to measure success with gaps on the backend), unclear personas (ex. who are we going after and what do they need/want?), and what experiences do we need to craft to help others navigate our ecosystem better, be reassured along the way, and how to best engage with NEAR.
For us, the month of February is about designing identity for NEAR with regards to the evolution NEAR with go through this year with the launch of major products and initiatives (ex. Grants, Guilds, Education.) Here’s a high-level overview of the typical brand identity process (Note: we are in stage 3.)
We’re meeting with brand agencies right now to help our team get things to market effectively and efficiently - some agencies are big, some small and mighty. The main criteria for all agencies is that they’ve had success (they can show, not tell) building out brands and campaigns aimed at engaging Developers.
This is a process we’ll be sharing more on in the coming weeks. For now, here’s a sample of the work-in-progress Brand Brief. (We are happy to answer questions or feedback on this.)
Our work-in-progress Brand Brief is helpful for getting everyone in the NEAR ecosystem aligned with NEAR’s Vision, Mission, and Values. This is important because the pulse of NEAR is around our Mission to “accelerate the world’s transition to open technologies by growing and enabling a community of developers and creators.” 
This is what gets us excited every day. 
This is what pushes our teams to do better than the day before and everything we do should tie back to this.
Regarding the brand refresh, we’ve been chatting with partners, teams, and contributors to NEAR’s ecosystem. From these discussions, a theme emerged along the lines of NEAR freeing people from constraints. So our Brand Working Group has been exploring this more.
We see creators and devs as explorers in an emerging world that is in real-time cracking before us. (Look at GME exposing a system of oppression that was always there but was unseen by many. Reddit has always been a platform for communication but someone somewhere understood the power of a collective to organize and unify and to show the world another way we operate in a system that is not a fair trade market.) How do we work together to change the system?
When we think about NEAR’s brand, we want to show how NEAR is cracking away at these same type of legacy systems and these new pieces we are enabling are not just forming a new path but a new reality. We need the curious creators, the perfectionist builders, the driven explorers. We want to attract the future Lucas, Disney, George RR Martin, Tolkien, Stan Lee — the explorers of our age. (A lofty goal - we know.) We want people of all kinds to open up new paths and dimensions that allow each one to go farther than the last. The beauty of NEAR is that nobody knows what you’ll discover or where you’ll go but there’s a sense of us exploring and going together. The visionaries we have in our ecosystem today — such as Mintbase — understand how close these new paradigms are and they are primed to forge ahead.
Our goal on the marketing team is to help enable this and be an amplifier to the Tech. We look forward to sharing future updates on this.
Chime in and let us know what you think!
Thanks for your support!
NEAR Foundation Marketing Team