DROP BOX – CASE STUDY

Group 1- Digital Marketing

Aju Jacob
Alex George
Vinayak S.
Vishu Pradeep
 WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING?

• Digital marketing is the component of marketing that utilizes internet and online based digital
technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones and other digital media and platforms
to promote products and services.
 DROPBOX

 Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in
San Francisco.

 Dropbox is a cloud storage service that lets you save files online, share files and sync them to your
devices.

 Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup

company, and was officially launched at 2008's TechCrunch Disrupt, an annual technology conference..

 Top alternatives to Dropbox include Google Drive, Apple iCloud, Microsoft OneDrive etc.

 Dropbox's target users range from individuals and small teams to large businesses, with plans tailoring
to each group.
 CASE SUMMARY

• Ranked as one of the most valuable startups in the world, Dropbox is currently one of the most used digital
utilities across the globe. Dropbox has a total of 500 million users, and its usage has been growing steadily ever
since. From 2009 to 2016, Dropbox was able to achieve growth from 1 million to 500 million users. Much of
this dramatic growth was fuelled by online marketing.
• As an online service, Dropbox’s online marketing was particularly important. Its users were already there — it
just needed to find a way to tap into them. It was able to do this in a scalable, cost-effective way by
essentially recruiting its own customers. Dropbox encouraged customers to invite others through a variety of
social media platforms, which turned the ordinary user into a brand ambassador.
• Further, Dropbox had to segregate its marketing campaigns. It wasn’t just a B2C utility; its ultimate goals were
to serve to businesses who would be more likely to pay for a premium model.
• This meant that Dropbox had to reach a certain saturation point. The more ubiquitous its product became, the
more likely it would be that commercial enterprises would invest in premium services. This underscored the
importance of fast, even chaotic, growth.
 STRATEGIES

Friend Referral Program

• Dropbox, with its attractive incentives, it has encouraged its users to tell one another about its
amazing product. For example, Dropbox gives out 500MB increase to both its user and the person
being referred to join when the signup process is pending.

Social Media
• Dropbox incentivizes users to share on social media by increasing the size of their accounts if they
do. According to Dropbox, there are two types of incentives based on the plan.
• Dropbox Basic accounts earn 500 MB per referral, up to 16 GB
• Dropbox Plus and Professional accounts get 1 GB per referral and can earn up to 32 GB
Signup Driven Homepage
• Dropbox’s landing page immediately describes its product in a single sentence and then prompts users to
commit. As a free product, Dropbox yields the best results by encouraging users to test out their service.

Sharing with Simplicity

• Dropbox makes it simple for you to share files with friends and family members. Both the sender and the
receiver of the files have little to do, thus offering simplicity.

Clean Interface Cluttered Interface

Signup driven Refer a Friend
homepage

Social Media  Easy Signup Process

 ANALYSIS

• Dropbox got 70,000 users overnight just by creating a demo video of the product intended for the Digg audience.
Don’t tell the user what to think, a wonderful product speaks for itself. It will need no convincing on your part.

• Friend referrals instill more trust than an advertisement ever could. Furthermore , the sender has an incentive to
spread the word about Dropbox—getting extra space. The referee also has an incentive for signing up.

• Dropbox makes it simple for people to share files. Simplicity is at the core of what top technology companies do.

• People need to access their products from anywhere at any time. Being available everywhere is key for Dropbox,
according to Co-Founder & CEO Drew Houston.
 SUGGESTIONS

• Excel in social media marketing - Apart from demonstrating their specialities they contribute ,try to
give something more that would definitely help them to be successful when compared to the
competitors.
Eg: Digital Marketing strategies of Redbull

• Email and video each constantly stand out as effective ways to market almost any product through
any industry.

• Remarketing- Another critical aspect of digital marketing is going after prospects again with
marketing content if they didn’t respond to your site’s banner ads the first time. This works by
tracking these visitors through cookies and creating new ads on related sites.

• They should tie up with bigger data based companies and online portal too.
 STATS

• Revenue reached from $116 million in 2012 to $216 million in 2014.

• In January 2014, Dropbox raised $250 million at a $10 billion valuation.

• 2 billion files are saved to Dropbox every 24 hours.

• 3 billion sharing connections have been created with Dropbox.

• Over 500 million users.

• Installed on 250 million devices.

• Used in 97% of Fortune 500 companies.

 LIMITATIONS

• The biggest difference of dropbox from other cloud storage services is security/privacy. Dropbox
has historically been rather weak in this regard, particularly when it comes to things like government
agencies seizing assets and/or demanding keys.

• Dropbox limits online file uploads to 10GB or less per file across accounts. Single-user free
accounts offer 2GB of storage. 

• Free and Pro accounts don’t offer team management tools, such as device tracking or member
addition and deletion.

• One of the disadvantages of this service is that the administrators or developers who maintain the
service have the right to delete information from free, inactive accounts. This means that if you
store some information on Dropbox and abandon the account for a few months, it is unlikely that
you will get it after you log back on.
 RECENT DOWNFALL

• Dropbox’s share of the global cloud storage market has fallen from 4.4% in 2017 to 3.6% in 2019 as more
competitors enter the space and existing competition ramped up storage options.

• With COVID-19-induced disruptions forcing most businesses to adapt their operations to be more remote
friendly, Dropbox was in prime position to gain market share.

• On the contrary, it is losing ground to the competition. Dropbox saw only a 16% YoY revenue increase in
2Q20 and a 17% YoY increase in 1H20. By comparison, Google Cloud’s revenue increased 43% YoY in
2Q20, and Microsoft grew its commercial cloud revenue by 39% YoY over the same period.

• Additionally, Dropbox has not been nearly as efficient at converting free users to paid users. Dropbox has
over 600 million registered users, but as of 2Q20, just 15 million (or 3% of registered users) were paying
users. Meanwhile, Box (BOX), a direct competitor, had ~13 million paying users out of just 71 million
registered users, or 18%, as of 2Q20. 20% of iCloud customers were paying users in 2018, the last time
Apple shared that stat.
 CONCLUSIONS

• Dropbox understands their users and the needs they have. They’ve gotten to where they are not by
advertising, but by going to where their users are, keeping things simple, and implementing a few
growth hacks.

• They do have fierce competition though: Google Drive by Google, OneDrive by Microsoft, iCloud by
Apple are all becoming more and more ubiquitous, making it a tough ocean to sail for Dropbox. Overall
this has a great future after having so many challenges dropbox is doing well.

• They had a huge increase in the users from 1million to 500 million mainly due to the typical online
marketing strategies they used.

• Dropbox is the kind of company you can label a marketing genius. They have made it easy for you to
store huge volumes of information by providing a superior customer experience.
 REFERENCE LINKS

• https://medium.com/swlh/dropbox-it-just-works-adc37f442ba4
• https://dsim.in/blog/2016/06/22/case-study-how-dropbox-became-a-worth-10-billion-company-
with-500-million-users/
• https://www.slideshare.net/dinker2/drop-box-case-study-analysis-57589892