Box. Collaboration at work.
Box is a cloud content collaboration platform chosen by the majority of the Fortune 500. In 2012 the company had just closed Series C funding. It was taking on Google and Microsoft with a mission to transform the way people work, so they can achieve their greatest ambitions.
In June 2012, Box had no own-able identity, no brand story and no scalable systems for message consistency across customer/prospect touchpoints.
As their Marketing VP, I was charged with taking them from scrappy startup to a world class enterprise brand ready to beat the big players on the global stage, and an IPO.
Turn a good product into a great brand.
The CMO had built a small team of ‘first hires’ - PR, AR, Demand Gen, Events, Product Marketing and Sales Support. My job was to bring these disciplines together with memorable messaging and well articulated marketing materials designed to scale efficiently across the entire company.
Below you'll find a tiny sampling of how my team and I curated Box marketing during this period of transformation and helped the company earn its place as a global industry leader. Box had a successful IPO on January 23rd 2015.
By the numbers.
150% growth in FY13 and 100% growth in FY14
100% YoY growth in EMEA
Nearly 60% of new ARR credited to Box Marketing
15% lift in brand recognition with enterprise businesses in 9 months
Over 11% lift in understanding of how easy Box makes sharing content
Equity of brand sustained gross margins at 75%
98% of Fortune 500 companies choosing Box
1 in-house Box Studio, for post-production serving US, EMEA and Japan
Over 1,200 'Boxers' on three continents trained in 12 months on Box mission, values, advocacy, unity and use of brand execution tools
Positioning, and big ideas
Brand strategy. A box without walls is a vessel without restrictions. A strong metaphor for this content platform that made a virtue out of a potentially problematic name.
With clarity on what we were challenging and how to think different in our approach, we created a companywide shift in behavior and culture.
Streamed web TV
Box liberates the flow of content, ideas and team conversations. Traditional thinking and conventional barriers prevent progress. Most people hate the barriers that come between them and their content so, for Hulu viewers, we removed them. All of them.
No ad breaks during your TV show on Hulu (a popular, web-based streaming TV service in the U.S.).
These placement drew 16x more response than ads on Hulu typically do.
Advertising
Full page in national broadsheets and editorial print magazines. Designed for forward thinking, educated, senior level business leaders to self select, understand the value proposition, and draw comfort from the category leaders already there.
One double-sided print ad with a top-edge hinged third page flap (see diagram). When you lift the flap to look underneath, another copy line, body copy, and logo is revealed.
Third page shown is the reverse side of the ad page.
Billboards
The digital billboards were mapped to driving circuits around affluent C-suite residential routes and the head offices of high value enterprise prospects and ABM targets. Box helps you achieve your company mission, whatever that purpose is.
People in the street posted the digital billboards to social media and tagged the companies, getting the attention of senior execs. Several high value account deals were nudged over the finish line.
Online
Keeping the message and experience consistent, we removed the barriers to your business content for a week - like the paywall on the business section of the NYT.
To sustain the momentum of the promise, testimonials from those using Box were built into a brand campaign on Quartz.com. They became one of the top three best performing communications on site that year.
Website
Rebuilt from the ground-up to better support verticals, solution selling, SEO, lead and event tracking. Responsive, and deployed on Drupal in US English, UK English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Japanese simultaneously.
Blog
A sprawling number of blog threads across the business (diluting SEO and brand visibility) consolidated into a custom built Drupal blog that allowed for subject focus, content search and discoverability.
Content marketing
A sample of the video created for story telling, education, vertical needs and use cases. None of these videos had a budget over $65k. Most were significantly less than $30k.
Data can be beautiful, and can sometimes become an extension of human behaviour that gives it an organic feel. In this series, we brought to life how adoption and community brought teams together, helping them function as ‘one’.
Collaboration in retail
Collaboration in manufacturing
Sales Support
Customer Stories
The story of how this beautiful animated short film, The Dam Keeper, was made possible with the help of great content collaboration.
A content collaboration platform that’s as effective in supporting your custom workflows in construction as it is in movie making.
Taxi tops
Targeted against core audience segments in NYC and SF, designed to bring the proposition to life in context over a back seat passenger when viewed from the street.
Direct mail
Simple, tactile brand experiences targeting paper deliveries for hotel guests and attendees of industry specific conferences and events, by city.
Interactive installations
Tactile, reusable installations that draw people in. Each device is responsive individually or collectively as one, highlighting the power of a connected workforce in union.
Used at airports topically, and at trade events.
Events
Boxworks is the company's big annual trade show. Held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, we drew just under 4,000 people in only the fourth year.
Attendees raved in social media. The press praised the visual energy, unique feel, and professionalism of the experience.
Equally as important, it successfully built relationships and reputation while raising many hundreds of new opportunities that have led to many millions in new pipe growth.
America
Moscone Center, San Francisco
Japan
Japanese market launch with opening of office in Tokyo and the first trade event for the newly formed Box Japan team, in partnership with Macnica Networks.
EMEA
Initially launched in UK, France, Spain and the Nordics, but quickly expanding to 10 countries across EMEA.
Box.org
"Giving back" initiative from Box designed to help nonprofits make their funding go further, be more effective, more collaborative, and more successful for the causes they're devoted to.
Identity
An elegant, contemporary enterprise class design system. Designed to scale efficiently with the business and allow it to move quickly while keeping production costs low. By January 2015, it was in daily use across North America, 10 European countries, Japan and Australia.
