It’s about 1:30 p.m. on a cool, cloudy Wednesday afternoon as the Uber that I booked drives me to the center of San Francisco’s South of Market district—affectionately called SoMa by Bay-area locals. At the heart of SoMa and adjacent to AT&T Park—home to MLB’s San Francisco Giants—sits a massive 200,000-square-foot, LEED-certified office space that’s somewhat plain and simple on the outside.
But, like many things in life, what’s on the outside of the building that houses Dropbox‘s headquarters is an entirely different experience than what’s on the inside.
I walk in to find an abundance of activity at the innumerable seating pods lit by natural light streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows; at the plethora of kitchens stocked with gourmet desserts and snacks; and at the meeting areas that could be mistaken for open playrooms. All of it is meant to spark creativity and innovation for the casually dressed, backpack-toting designers, engineers, social media mavens, and marketers who I watch scuttle across polished cement floors from one comfy couch to another.
On this particular late spring day, the 10 marketing team leads at Dropbox have convened for a Q3 planning meeting and brainstorming session that’s directed—but certainly not dominated—by Julie Herendeen, VP of marketing at the file-sharing service. As the team gathers around the table, she tells me that she simply can’t imagine not including others in her daily decision-making.
“I always love to get people in a room, brainstorm, and have the conversation,” she says while describing her rather humble style of leadership at Dropbox. “That’s when you get all of the ideas on the table. We believe that great ideas can come from anywhere, so it’s very much not a top-down culture.”
This afternoon Herendeen, who holds an MBA from Harvard, purposely sits at the side, rather than at the head, of the elongated conference table and sets the vision for her leadership team members attending the meeting. She starts the conversation with a simple opening statement: “We need to make sure that everyone has all of the resources that they need to carry out their plans through the third quarter.” The plans she referenced are the foundation of Dropbox’s product development strategy.
The Dropbox you love, now for business. http://t.co/O01v6xI074
https://t.co/CuG3AtabbA
— Dropbox for Business (@DropboxBusiness) July 24, 2015
She continues her thoughts by saying that the main focus of this planning is meant to target the business community. Herendeen underscores one goal before opening the floor to questions: make the company’s business tools and offerings just as widely used as its consumer products. In a sort of self-effacing way, she frequently asks for feedback, comments—and, ultimately, insights—that guide the intimate summit.
When I ask her about her collaborative approach, she replies: “You have to create a process that’s actually not too heavy on the processes; but it should encourage people to take that time to brainstorm and be part of creating what the team’s going to focus on. I think that’s how people get excited.”
Customer obsession
After the team meeting I have the opportunity to spend one-on-one time with several Dropbox executives. I’m looking forward to learning more about how the company channels that team excitement into strategy.
As I walk through the office it seems to me that excitement is the electrical current that powers Dropbox—a source that fuels its many millennial employees, tech-loving users, and fervent fans. Since CEO Drew Houston and CTO Arash Ferdowsi launched the platform in 2007, Dropbox has accumulated an impressive user base—one that’s more than 400 million global users strong. In fact, 70% are outside of the U.S. and stretch across 200 countries. The company has more than 1,200 employees with offices in Austin, Dublin, Israel, London, New York, Paris, Seattle, Sydney, and Tokyo.
“We are obsessed about customers and understanding customers; and that [obsession] is really refreshing for marketing,” Kitty Oestlien, head of product marketing at Dropbox, tells me when we discuss the team’s energy and enthusiasm. Oestlien works each day to drive the growth and development of Dropbox products and insists that it’s the marketing team’s passion for users that translates into solid marketing strategy that addresses a broad swath of users.
Dropbox is a platform that is every bit a B2B product as it is B2C, with 97% of Fortune 500 companies and reportedly eight million businesses using it. Users synchronize an estimated 1.2 billion files each day.
“Marketing to consumers and B2B is a winning strategy. We understand both needs…and it’s really the reason why we’ve grown so much in business,” Oestlien says. “We have such strong consumer adoption. And then we have a lot of advocacy in businesses—not just among consumers—to start adopting [Dropbox products].”
Despite that advocacy, penetrating the B2B market to the extent that Dropbox has planned will require a different approach than B2C marketing. “B2B is a unique challenge,” says Sheila Vashee, the company’s corporate marketing lead, who I met with after Oestlien in one of the company’s many minimalist, eco-friendly conference rooms. Vashee, leaning back comfortably and wearing well-worn blue jeans, points out that understanding the unique needs of businesses can help solve the B2B marketing puzzle.
Vashee knows that providing each business customizable products that fit their specific needs will require team effort. So, on this particular afternoon she reached out to each person on her seven-person marketing team to go over the details discussed in Q3 planning meeting.
“On the B2B side you have a breadth of the types of business you’re serving,” she says. “You have construction companies, big organizations in media, and big design firms that use Dropbox. We’re trying to meet all of those different needs in varying industries. What’s interesting is there’s a common sort of thread that unites all of them. They want to be able to work the best way possible and however they want. That applies to individuals and businesses.”
Getting users whatever they want and however they want it is the essence of meeting demand. I meet with Giancarlo Lionetti—or GC, as everyone around the office calls him—Dropbox’s head of digital demand generation, to learn more about how Dropbox addresses that challenge. He says that he arrives at his open workspace by 7:30 a.m. each morning with the goals of boosting brand awareness, driving traffic to several Web properties, and creating positive user experiences. It’s a marketing formula, he says, that will keep users coming back for more.
“Building a loyal following is hugely important,” Lionetti says. “A great product will build an almost cult-like following. It produces that viral marketing effect; it’s word-of-mouth marketing. Build from the user base, and then our job as marketers is simply to make sure they’re getting everything they want in a product.” And with a passion for the customer that’s palpable at Dropbox, there’s no question its team will do just that.
