NTT Communications
Developing the Partner Programme
Background
NTT Communications is the largest communications company in the world, providing long distance and international communications in over 200 countries. It also provides a broad range of Internet services, including hosting infrastructure, security offerings and professional services.
However, much of the hosting market is commodity driven, and NTT wanted to position itself as much more than a simple hosting solutions provider through a network of serious channel partners. Its objective was to promote itself as a business partner who understood its partner's business, and was able to provide specific solutions and ongoing business and technical support.
To this end, NTT had developed a strong vertical go-to-market model targeting specialist partners delivering to the enterprise hosting market.
Identify
Working with the client, we identified two major issues. Firstly, very few people within the target audience actually knew who NTT was. Fewer still knew how big the company really was. Only when this was known would they sit up and take notice.
Secondly, it was essential that NTT spoke the right language to each vertical and adopted the appropriate tone of voice.
Recommend
We recommended a framework of powerful sector-specific messaging that NTT could use in its Partner Programme communications to its target verticals - Financial Services, Public Sector, Retail and Media & Entertainment.
We also developed from scratch a high-impact look and feel for all communications, one that supported the overall proposition, reflected the NTT brand and differentiated the company from the plethora of Partner Programmes in the market place.
Express
Partner Programmes, whatever the industry, tend to say the same thing and look extremely uninspiring. Our creative used two interconnecting lozenges; one to represent NTT, the other to represent the prospective partner company. The overlap thus represented the area of joint concern, and could be filled with images, icons or copy.
We also developed an icon, a set of supporting images and a colour code for each sector.
We created all sales support material and the design has now been delivered throughout Europe and across most Partner-based material both on and offline.
