Box CMO Chris Koehler: Now more than ever, brands must practice what they preach

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The pandemic threw a wrench into just about every marketer’s playbook -- even the companies that sell virtual products for a living. Chris Koehler, CMO of cloud management firm Box, knows this all too well. 

“Engaging your customers and prospects in a digital way is hard and so is building relationships purely through the video screen,” he says. 

So, what do you do? In Koehler’s case, you bring together your client and its account team to solve a virtual escape room challenge. 

“It’s a way of team building,” he says. “You have to rely on each other and you start to build trust. It's different than passively listening to another PowerPoint presentation.”

Koehler first grew interested in what makes brands stand out when he was in high school: “I found it fascinating that everyone would start wearing a certain brand, like Z. Cavaricci or Ocean Pacific. I saw how quickly people jumped in to be part of the trending story.”

He's brought that fascination with social psychology into his work in the B2B space. “I take a lot of inspiration around what's happening in B2C and I think through what they’re doing, how they’re engaging and how we can apply it to the enterprise space,” he says.

Koehler has taken a few detours in his marketing career. Prior to joining Box, he spent more than 10 years at Adobe Systems, holding leadership roles in product, sales and customer success. Having that kind of broader business view can help marketers boost a company’s bottom-line, he says. And that means marketers must embrace an ever-expanding remit.

“We need to be ambassadors of the brand. We need to be culture-literate, technically-proficient, customer-obsessed, creative leaders which is pretty exhausting.” 

That ambassadorial role also means marketers need to help their companies wade into controversial waters. 

“Consumers are looking for us to take a stance and have a point of view,” he says. “We have the responsibility as marketers, as the voice of the company, to make sure that what we believe in and what we stand for is how we act as a company,” he says. “But it's a delicate balance.” Below, he shares more of his story. 

1. What has had the most impact on your perspective as a marketer?

I have had the opportunity in my career to work across different business functions, including Product, Sales, Customer Success and different marketing disciplines. It has given me appreciation for the complexities of all the different parts of the organization. I know the tradeoffs that the product team is dealing with. I understand the stress and pressure that the sales org has with meeting quotas, and in customer success roles, I've had to sit down with customers to hear about their issues and challenges. This has helped to shape my understanding of the business and allows me to think more like a general manager. And as a marketer, that shapes and informs the empathy I have for the different functions and for the customer. 

We need to be thinking about the entirety of the customer experience and it's incredibly important that we partner closely with Sales, Product and Customer Success to do that. We also need to be aligned from a metric perspective because this is what enables your organization to grow. It has taken me years to understand this. At Box, marketing has great relationships with all the orgs across the business and that is very intentional. 

2. What’s changed the most about your job as a marketer over the course of your career?

I would have to say the complexity of the technology and the accountability of ROI has changed the most. 

At the start of my career, it was all about database marketing for direct mail, which actually has similar concepts (predictive modeling, segmentation, etc.) but the results were so delayed. Now it is all done in real-time, which is truly amazing. 

One of the things that I've learned throughout my career is that you can't just think about customers in terms of segments and personas, you have to think about them as humans that have business challenges they are looking to solve. Data should inform the experience but you also have to think about it in the lens of the customer. You can't just categorize and market to people in the same way and it's important to build direct relationships. 

Today, the entire customer engagement model and selling motion for B2B is digital. Enterprise companies have always relied heavily on high touch in-person engagements with our customers, but with this pandemic, we are trying to replicate those relationships in a digital way. And building relationships through the video screen is increasingly difficult especially as customers are inundated with online conferences and digital networking events.

3. What’s the hardest part of a marketer’s job today?

The hardest part by far is context switching and the technical complexity of the marketing stack (which has literally thousands of tools and innovations). While this is the hardest part of a marketer's job, the combination of these two things has transformed how the marketing function works -- becoming more agile, interdependent, while still driving company growth. I recently saw a saying that "TikTok is marketing at the speed of culture, which is moving at dizzying speed." In today's climate, marketers more than ever need to be ambassadors of their brand. We need to make sure that what we believe in and what we stand for is how we act as a company. We need to be culture-literate, technically-proficient, customer-obsessed, creative leaders, which is pretty exhausting.

4. Tell us about the marketing campaign you’re most proud of working on in your career.

At the start of the pandemic, we were hearing from many of our Box customers and prospects looking for guidance and best practices on how to move organizations quickly and efficiently to a remote environment. What spun out of that was this idea of Work Unleashed, which is basically a guide with insights and resources on how to enable your teams to do their best work, anywhere, anytime. It includes our own best practices and tips as well as video conversations with leading organizations on how they are navigating the "new normal" of work today. In addition to this, we also facilitated online small group discussions, which included live Q&A with our CEO and CIO. We have received very positive feedback around this and we believe we helped many organizations with the challenges they faced.

Another campaign I'm proud of is Hovering Art Director. While I did not work on this directly (the amazing team at Adobe partnered with one of our agencies in Europe to create this), I was running the Go-to-market efforts for Creative Cloud for enterprise at this time, which included the Adobe Stock business. Basically we acted like a start-up inside of Adobe where we were competing with Getty and Shutterstock. We had to create something that was fun, viral, and cost effective. I think this one hit the mark. 

5. What's a marketing campaign you wish you'd thought of?

I've always been a big fan of the Get a Mac campaign (Mac versus PC). It was such a great, creative and engaging way to build a new segment of customers to rethink their PC purchase.

6. What’s your must read, watch or listen for all marketers?

I am a big fan of the CMO Podcast with Jim Stengel, and the books Competing in the Age of AI (a plug for a couple of my amazing professors at HBS), and Lead and Disrupt, which is a super relevant idea on how to explore new models and markets while trying to maintain and exploit your core competency. 

7. What’s an under the radar brand you’re watching and why? 

On Cloud running shoes out of Switzerland is a great brand and I love the product. They are amazingly comfortable, lightweight and fit really well. On has also done a great job creating a global community of runners, including high profile athletes that share their experiences not only with each other but more broadly through social channels. They are winning a bunch of design and technology awards. And in just ten years since they started, their shoes are being sold in 6,500 retailers across 50 countries.

8. Name a product you can’t live without (that doesn’t connect you to the internet) and tell us why.

Nespresso for sure. I drink a lot of coffee and Nespresso makes it really simple to make in between Zoom video calls. Maybe also Topo Chico, since I need to stay hydrated after drinking as much coffee as I do. 

9. Finish this sentence. If I weren’t a marketer, I would be…

University professor. I am a lifelong learner and also love to teach. Maybe that is what I will do in retirement.

10. Finish this sentence: The marketer I most want to see do this questionnaire is… 

Fernando Machado, the global CMO of Restaurant Brands. What he and the team are doing at Burger King is amazing. It's fun, creative, and empathetic while driving results. It is fun to watch.   

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