A Brand Perception Case Study: How Dropbox Lifted Perception 19%

This work began with a research phase to gather perspectives from nearly 3,000 employees, candidates, and alumni through various research sources, including social listening data, netnography, and external research to understand what attracted candidates to Dropbox and what retained employees over time.

Through this process, we got to the heart of what differentiated Dropbox from its competitors: It’s a “Goldilocks-sized” company with a mission-driven culture of autonomy, flexibility, and diversity. With these insights, we drafted the Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and five messaging pillars to unite Dropboxers under a core belief and create a strong messaging foundation.

Those new pillars were:

• We’re all a work in progress. A nod to continued self-improvement; this pillar also inspired the name of Dropbox’s annual conference.
• Be kind, and kind of extraordinary. Reflecting the insight we continually heard that Dropboxers are smart, genuinely nice people.
• Work should be challenging not hard. Removing the ‘work about work’ was core to Dropbox’s identity.
• Individuals make better teams. Dropbox is a place where people from all backgrounds are free to show up as their authentic selves, and the work is better for it.
• Together we work. Unity behind the core mission of the company ensures productive forward progress.

To build out campaigns and integrate insights, we worked as an extension of Dropbox’s team. An active Slack channel allowed us to interface with multiple teams to continuously discuss industry insights, ideate, and iterate. This constant collaboration allowed us to create even stronger campaigns that put Dropbox’s people—and beliefs—in the spotlight.

To generate a sense of excitement for engineer candidates, we highlighted the real story of what Dropbox does. It’s not just a place where engineers work on a file-sharing platform; it’s a place where they can turn their ideas into reality, make an impact, and build future-focused products that help people around the world. The result was a recruiting piece—the Build the Future animation campaign—that represented a true invitation to join this exciting work. Although we initially deployed single campaigns, early success for the Build the Future campaign inspired Dropbox to scale the concept into a year-long campaign to support their overarching recruitment strategy.

To offer an honest and authentic look at #LifeInsideDropbox, we created the Getting to Dropbox series of live-action videos, which followed employees around the world on their daily commutes in Austin, Paris, and San Francisco. These documentary-style unscripted personal narratives, shot in collaboration with acclaimed filmmaker Bas Berkhout, weaved together multiple brand pillars, touching on themes of individuality, flexibility, productivity, and balance. By giving the audience a first-hand look at life behind the company’s walls, the series humanized Dropbox and delivered the sort of genuine storytelling that moves perception.

We also supported Dropbox’s Business and Talent Brand teams with event branding, presentation decks, ads, video, and assets to promote key events—including a security webinar to engage IT decision-makers and general decision-makers, a live panel on culture, and a webinar targeting state and local government.

Working as an extension of the talent brand team, we built a truly unified Dropbox Talent Brand, delivering campaigns and experiences that significantly moved the needle.