Introduction

Throughout 2023, Plastic Words was fortunate to work with nimbus, an Australian technology company offering Work Force Optimisation (WFO) systems in the enterprise space. One of their services in business continuity offered a solution to a significant problem: critical voice communications during planned and unplanned outages.

The challenge was that nimbus needed to work out how to communicate the value of this service to the uninitiated. More importantly, it needed to develop a narrative that carried itself through the Telstra end-to-end sales channel, as the product was designed as a carrier-grade Business Resumption Service (BRS).

The nimbus team has deep technical knowledge of the telecommunications world. Now they needed to describe to a broad and diverse audience what a ‘trunk’ is, and why spontaneous call redirects and rollbacks are so amazing. Translating this technical language into an accessible story presented a puzzle. What nimbus needed was a savvy, creative team to do the word work.

This is where Plastic Words entered and helped shape the nimbus story.

nimbus and Telstra BRS (Plus)

This project involved working with a large, complex organisation with key stakeholders and drivers. Telstra is a massive company with its own ways of working and branding that is continually changing. The nimbus team had to be conscious of how they fit into this vast and fluid Telstra landscape while developing their own distinct brand identity. For Plastic Words, this translated into multiple contact points and the need to be highly adaptive.

Our first impression of the nimbus team was that they clearly knew what they were doing. Proud of their product, the last thing needed was advice on technology. They were keen to build on their successes and engage Telstra partners and customers as soon as possible.

Their target market included a mix of existing customers using outdated or simplified versions of similar products and new clients who needed to know the business continuity options. Much of the existing marketing material discreetly focused on these target markets, using highly technical language without a narrative to hold it all together.

Our goal became to develop a repeatable and reusable product narrative that could be easily tailored to different audiences while maintaining important information and brand alignment.

Our Strategy in Three Steps

In working with nimbus, we used three classic Plastic Words steps:

1. Immersion: information gathering and understanding the product

We began by interviewing key stakeholders about the business, their values, and the product. This step involves active listening to draw out details and align our work with their brand voice and business goals. At the same time, we assessed existing customer and partner-facing collateral to develop a working understanding of where these elements require clarification. As nimbus is part of the broader Telstra ecosystem, this step also involved ongoing stakeholder interactions to ensure alignment with overarching strategy and branding.

2. Construction: developing the narrative

The second phase was to develop a brand narrative. This consisted of distilling a concise, simplified product or service summary into a reusable toolkit using audience-appropriate language. We merged Telstra’s brand kit together with the nimbus brand kit. This resulted in a suite of reusable phrases and summaries, ranging from elevator pitches to whole use cases that both organisations can use across contexts with minimal need for adaptation. This diverse material was helped together by a single, strategic brand narrative that clearly and strategically expressed the value of nimbus in every piece of communication.

3. Application: guiding the narrative

These assets were then applied to a selection of marketing and strategic communications to be used by Telstra and nimbus. This meant a variety of Electronic Direct Mail to sales staff, clients, vendors, partners, and leads; a one-page brochure; slide packs; and executive communications, including case studies, proposals, and newsletters. As the project progressed, we worked with nimbus to track responses and the impact of these strategic communications and follow up with complimentary material. This ensured that real-world impact and stakeholder feedback constantly informed the application process.

Outcomes

The new nimbus and Telstra BRS (Plus): equipping and empowering.

This was a complicated project with changing language and requirements at each stage. At the end of this process, the nimbus team had a full suite of digital assets connected by a clear product narrative. When they need to communicate their product and services, nimbus now has a high-quality, repeatable toolkit ready to go. They can also now create fresh material with a firm understanding of the reasoning used in its construction. In this way, along with providing valuable assets, Plastic Words equipped the nimbus team with strategic and creative tools they can use moving forward.