Brief 2 – Identify an Online Brand

A new brief came our way on 1st October. It said that working in groups, we were to identify a new online brand, product or service and address a few questions:

• Who is the target audience?
• Who or what are the main competitors?
• What is if anything is effective about the current Advertising campaign? What is missing if anything from the current Advertising campaign?

I was put in the group with Jyoti, Chen and Nayuta. All worked well in researching and we made up a nice power-point presentation to show our research.

We all decided to work on Dropbox, In my opinion it is one of the most successful online services. All worked well in organising the data and research, while Nayuta, made a beautiful power-point. Jyoti and I decided to present the power-point. I introduced Dropbox and spoke about what is missing in its current advertising campaign, while Jyoti spoke about its competitors and what or how its current advertising campaign is.

This is what I talked about:

What is Dropbox?

Dropbox is an online application started by two MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi in year 2007. Currently its headquarters are at California in United States. Dropbox has won many accolades, prominent or which are:

• Macworld Editors’ Choice Award (2009)
• Techcrunch Best Internet Application Award (2010)

This online application has more than 200 Million users worldwide. It not only lets you save your files online on their cloud server, but also lets you access it from anywhere, on any device (smart-phone, tablet, laptop, etc.) All you need is a device and and internet connection. Dropbox was built with a primary motive to eliminate the use of USB storage devices. You don’t need to worry about your data if your computer, laptop or smart-phone is broken, or lost, or gets stolen.

Dropbox initially gives you 2GB space for free. It keeps a 30-day backup and a 30-day version history of all your files stored on it for free. You can share your files (no matter how big) with your friends, even the ones who don’t use this service. A new feature that the mobile application has seen is that it automatically takes a backup of your pictures in your device that you take with your device’s camera.

Its very easy to use, with a non-cluttered and intuitive interface. Dropbox doesn’t show any external advertisements on its service interface.

Dropbox keeps your files secure from external and malicious attacks with its 256-bit AES encription and its 2-step verification system.

What is missing from Dropbox’s advertising campaign?

For starters, there are a lot of things that this intelligent piece of software can be used for. But in that area, a lot of third-party advertising like pod-casts have been helpful, by educating the users of its lesser known features. But what i really feel is missing in its campaign is its world-wide reach.

According to Alexa Internet Inc, Dropbox has 29.5% users from United States. 4.9% and 4.8% users of Dropbox live in India and United Kingdom respectively. Japan’s contribution is only 2.3%. Although Dropbox.com is a very popular site in United Kingdom (Rank: 75), but it is not very popular in Russia (rank: 250) and Japan (rank: 315). Data accessed on 7.10.2013.

The main reason I feel for this low ranking in Japan and Russia is the language barrier. Although Dropbox is currently available in Japanese but still it needs more advertising for the people there to adopt it. I’m from India and can’t see Dropbox in any Indian language. For me English is fine, but I feel that if Dropbox was available in several Indian Languages then more people will accept it.

This concludes my part of the presentation. In this group project I learnt to work as a team and more importantly negotiate ideas. I had to negotiate with the ideas of other team members of my team where they were in a conflict of my ideas.

The actual powerpoint presentation can be seen below:

[slideshare id=28903567&doc=online-20brand-20-28navmeet-29-131204184527-phpapp02]