The New Kind Start Here Guide

About you

If you’re arriving here, then you’re likely one of two types of leaders. You might be responsible for marketing and brand (often as the CMO / Head of Marketing). Or, you might be a founder looking at your business through a marketing lens (often coming from a technical background).

Your company is likely either a funded startup or an established global enterprise. A publicly traded company, or privately held and backed by venture or private equity. 

You may be looking for help with company or product positioning, messaging, and story to sell your products. Or verbal and visual brand identity to help you stand out as a market leader. 

Ultimately, you want to help your company scale. Fulfilling your highest vision. Creating meaning and value for everyone you serve.

You recognize that positioning is central to this effort.

About us

We’ve been tackling tech’s biggest positioning challenges for decades.

New Kind was founded nearly 15 years ago. It began as a partnership between in-house and external brand leaders — together developing the Red Hat brand during its march to being a billion dollar open source enterprise.

Our team has deep experience in B2B tech strategy and branding, especially in SaaS and open source. 

If you’re looking to start up, scale up, or stay on top, and you’re facing a positioning or strategic branding issue, we’ve probably seen it and solved it. 

We’ve worked with large companies like Red Hat, GitLab, and Lenovo. We’ve built brands like Ansible from early startup to successful acquisition — now still thriving as one of the world’s most popular open source projects. And we’ve done it through industry-wide shifts like the cloud and AI.

We do it by helping our clients scale with soul. Helping them build meaning into their messages and identity — as they build the infrastructure of the future. 

What work do you do?

The core of what we do is positioning strategy. We take a holistic view of positioning, and apply it across brand expression. That can include brand stories and messaging, visual and verbal identity, naming, employer value propositions, and product marketing strategy. All designed to help you create competitive advantage. 

We work in problem spaces where we know we can deliver unique expertise and value for your organization. While our work and teams intersect with digital marketing, UX, design production, and web development — we rely on others for these domains. 

How do you approach this work?

We have two broad approaches. We’ll work with you in the scoping phase to determine which is the best place to start. 

Positioning Accelerator — Designed as a 4-6 week sprint-based offering, based on our hardened frameworks. We focus on positioning, story, and messaging. It won’t solve for everything you need to do. But it will help you get a solid foundation in place. You’ll end up with a positioning system to guide your sales, marketing, and visionary efforts. These engagements involve an investment of $75K-$125K.

Customized Positioning — Custom engagements are just what they sound like: We take your unique challenges and structure a process to deliver on the objectives. 

This is the right choice if you have a lot of nuance, stakeholder involvement, and complexity in your current state and desired future. 

In return, you’ll receive increased investment of New Kind resources. You’ll go through a dynamic process, including working sessions and frameworks designed to align your team, and ultimately get a tailored set of tools for the future. 

Custom engagements typically take 3-6 months. The timeframe depends on where it fits within your executive priorities, which offerings are included, and how deeply and broadly we work with your company. These engagements start at $200K.

Who will I work with?

New Kind is a small team with deep expertise. When you work with us, you’ll likely be working with the same people you met in our first conversations. Our design and messaging experts will round out your team with relevant skills. 

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How do you scope work and onboard new clients?

How do you make sure we’re a good match?

We only take on projects when we know we can provide unique value. We work hard to accurately understand your challenges. 

We start with a conversation over email. We make sure your challenge sounds like something we can solve, and also ensure we both have the resources ready to fully engage. If it’s not the right fit for a New Kind engagement, we’ll tell you. We won’t waste your time or sell you something that won’t solve your problem.

Once we’re on the same page, we have a virtual meeting. Here we gather more understanding of your challenges and goals, and explore the best scope and structure for the engagement to solve it.

What is the result of the process?

There are four possible outcomes:

1. We’re not the right fit, based on scope, chemistry, timing, or budget. We aim to help each other determine that ASAP.
2. We need to know more about what you’re trying to do, and who we’ll be working with. We might be the right fit — let’s continue the conversation at a deeper level, and/or with the full decision-making group.
3. We need an engagement to best determine how to achieve your business goals. We need to better understand how to prioritize budget and strategic concerns. We’ll suggest an accelerated diagnostic and opportunity roadmap to scope the work.
4. We understand your goals, and can offer multiple ways of approaching them. These approaches involve tradeoffs with timing, working styles, scope, and budget.
   

After we’ve met to share the approaches and agreed on an approach and investment level, we’ll create a Statement of Work. We’ll schedule the engagement when the SOW is signed.

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