26 years, one company, and the quiet art of marketing empty rooms

In 1999, marketing a self-storage company was not a job people bragged about at parties. It meant buying space in the Yellow Pages, mailing postcards to nearby zip codes, and hoping someone who needed a place to park their extra couch would remember the name. Dayna Hathaway took that job. She was one of three people on the marketing team at a company called Extra Space Storage, and the internet was barely a rumor. Twenty-six years later she is the company's Chief Marketing Officer, and Extra Space Storage is the largest self-storage operator in the United States.

The distance between those two facts is the whole story. Most marketing careers are told as a series of jumps, one logo swapped for a slightly better logo every two or three years. Hathaway's career is the opposite shape. She stayed. She kept making the job bigger until the job caught up with her, and then the company caught up too. By the time she was named CMO in early 2025, the marketing team she had joined as employee number three had grown past 40, and the footprint she was marketing had gone from roughly 30 retail locations to more than 1,000.

Before the internet had a search box

Hathaway did not arrive at Extra Space Storage green. She had worked in an advertising agency and in the high-tech world before joining in 1999, which turned out to be useful timing. She landed right as the ground was about to move. Her early responsibilities were the analog staples of the era: managing Yellow Pages ads, running a direct mail program, doing the unglamorous arithmetic of getting a phone to ring at a storage facility.

Then the web arrived, and the storage business had a problem that looked a lot like an opportunity. Storage is what marketers politely call a low-consideration purchase made under stress. People do not shop for a unit for months. They need one because they are moving, downsizing, splitting a household, or running out of room in the garage, and they need it this week. That urgency lives online, in the moment someone types a question into a search bar. Hathaway saw it early and pushed the company to move its budget from print toward digital. She helped establish the extraspace.com presence back when a clean web address was still something you could simply claim.

Storage is the rare product people buy the same week they start looking. Win the search, win the customer.

It sounds obvious in hindsight. It was not obvious then. Shifting money out of the Yellow Pages meant walking away from a channel that had reliably worked for decades, on the bet that a newer, stranger one would work better. Hathaway made that bet, and the operating logic she helped build, lower the cost to acquire each customer while pushing occupancy up, became the quiet engine underneath a company that kept getting bigger.

The color, the counter, and the brand

Some of Hathaway's fingerprints on the company are things a customer would notice without ever knowing who to thank. She is credited with launching the wasabi green that became part of the Extra Space Storage identity, the kind of ownable color choice that does more brand work than a paragraph of copy ever could. She also helped rethink the facility offices themselves, pushing them away from the industrial back-room feel that the storage category had accepted for years and toward something cleaner and more retail, a place that signaled friendliness and security rather than a chain-link afterthought.

That instinct, that the experience of a place is part of its marketing, is not the sort of thing that shows up in a quarterly dashboard. It shows up slowly, in the trust a brand earns when the physical thing matches the promise. For a business selling a commodity, the identical unit is available three exits down the highway, those small signals are most of the game.

Marketing a merger the size of a small country

The other place Hathaway's work becomes visible is in the deals. A growing company grows partly by buying other companies, and every acquisition arrives with a marketing problem attached. Two brands, two customer bases, two sets of signage and habits and expectations, all of which have to become one without dropping the customers caught in the middle. She led marketing through the Storage USA acquisition, and then through the far larger merger with Life Storage, a transaction valued at roughly 12 billion dollars.

A merger is not finished when the papers are signed. It is finished when a customer stops noticing there were ever two companies.

Integrations like that are where marketing earns its keep or quietly loses customers. Somebody has to decide how the combined thing shows up in search, how the two websites become one, how a renter of the acquired brand learns that nothing they care about has broken. Over the same stretch, Extra Space Storage went public and eventually joined the S&P 500, a milestone that turns a regional operator into a name investors track by ticker. Hathaway's marketing sat underneath all of it.

The long game as a strategy

Hathaway earned her marketing degree from Westminster College in Salt Lake City, the same city where Extra Space Storage is headquartered and where she has built the whole of this career. She now oversees the National Solutions Center alongside the marketing team, and the group she leads has grown into the hundreds. In 2024 she was invited onto the Utah Valley University Marketing Board of Advisors, a role built around closing the gap between what students learn in a classroom and what the work actually demands. It is a fitting assignment for someone whose own education was mostly on the job, watching a single industry rebuild itself around her.

There is a temptation to read a 26-year run at one company as a story about caution, someone who found a comfortable seat and kept it. The record argues the other way. Comfort does not survive the arrival of the internet, a string of acquisitions, an IPO, and a 12 billion dollar merger. What survives that is someone who kept volunteering to own the next hard thing, and who understood that in a category everyone else finds boring, the person willing to stay and compound is the one who eventually runs it.

In June 2025 Utah Business named her to its Executive Excellence class, the kind of recognition that tends to arrive for people who have been quietly indispensable for a long time. The award described the familiar traits, strategic, collaborative, a builder and a connector. The more interesting fact is the one underneath it. She took a job nobody wanted, in a category nobody watched, and stayed long enough to make both of them matter.