Pinterest’s Hold On Retail

When Pinterest launched in 2009, its co-founder and CEO of photo-sharing site Pinterest Ben Silbermann didn’t exactly have people beating down his door to tell him what a brilliant idea he had stumbled on, according to reports. In the era of real-time text feeds, people didn’t think a photo-sharing platform had much of a future.

Nine months in, it looked like the naysayers may have been right. Pinterest was being run out of a small apartment shared by its leadership team, and had only managed capture about 10,000 users.

However, Silbermann did not embrace his failure as a learning experience — instead, he just worked that much harder.

“I think I personally wrote to the first 5,000 users,” Silbermann told CNN.

He also reportedly gave out his personal cellphone number and met new users for coffee. Silbermann was dedicated to Pinterest, and believed there was a world of people out there who could be as dedicated to the idea as he was.

“A lot of people ask, ‘Why did you keep going? Why didn’t you bail?'” he said. “I think the idea of telling people, ‘We blew it,’ was just too embarrassing.”

And as it turns out, sometimes Cinderella stories happen in real life. After a very successful launch on the iPhone and iPad, Pinterest took off and soon had millions and then tens of millions of users. By 2012 Pinterest was ranked as the third largest social media network in the U.S., and by June 2015 it was valued at $11 billion, making it the eighth most valuable unicorn in the U.S.

Pinterest can clearly attract eyeballs. In fact, Pinterest is now actively stealing those eyes from more traditional sources of consumer traffic.

“We’re all fighting for time and fighting for eyeball space. The active Pinterest user is watching less TV, they are reading fewer magazines, they are looking through fewer catalogues and they are spending less time on search engines like Google,” said Bob Gilbreath, co-founder and president at Ahalogy, a Pinterest Marketing Developer partner.

Gilbreath was presenting hot-off-the-press results of Ahalogy’s second annual Pinterest Media Consumption Study at PYMNTS’ R2 Summit — the celebration of all things reinventing retail.

So how is Pinterest reinventing retail?

“Pinterest is becoming a platform for the imagination and what else can we do to give people ideas they haven’t had before and then activate those ideas because the purchase is part of the process,” Gilbreath told the assembled crowd at R2.

“Coming up with the idea, getting what you need and then going and achieving it — that’s one of the awesome things about the platform and I think that’s one of the things that’s helping reinvent retail,” he added. “It is very early still but a lot of places still to go.”

How is Pinterest going to get to all of those places? By helping merchants directly deal with the best kind of consumer — the one who has demonstrated that they are already looking to buy.

Who’s Using Pinterest – Some Of What You Expect, Some Surprises

If your mental image of the average Pinterest user is of a technologically enthused millennial woman, you are, statistically speaking, very likely correct. The majority (67 percent) of Pinterest users are under the age of 40, 80 percent are female and 70 percent describe themselves as early tech adopters.

However, Gilbreath noted, males are rapidly becoming a larger part of Pinterest using audience, and the average Pinterest user is developing consumption preferences over a wide ranging field of potential consumer goods.

“It’s not just recipes,” he told the crowd, noting that Pinterest users are into DIY home projects, crafts, fashion, electronics and home decor — and what Pinterest essentially offers is a better way to search and locate things that connect to those interests.

“People are going to the grocery stores to buy the ingredients they’ve pinned, or going to the mall to pick up what it is they want to buy and wear after pinning it,” Gilbreath noted. “We are enabling reverse showrooming. Consumers are looking at things at home on the couch but in a way that makes it easier for them to go to a store and and actually buy it later. Seventy percent of Pinterest users claim to have made a purchase because of Pin and 40 percent report having done so because of a Promoted Pin.”

And, he noted, that audience is incredibly mobile oriented, an important consideration for marketers struggling to catch consumers’ eyes in an era when consumers are more consistently looking at smaller and smaller screens. Pinterest is used on mobile devices 80 percent of the time, according to the Ahalogy survey, with 67 percent of users pulling up their Pins while shopping.

And those Pins are being viewed all over the commerce ecoysystem — 52 percent used the service while at a mass retailer, 45 percent looked at Pinterest to get inspired for a project and 28 percent used it to purchase the necessary supplies.

“We are a mobile medium. If you are trying to win at mobile, Pinterest is a great way to pay.”

Past Traditional Demographics

“Sometimes as marketers, we wander a little too far into the demographics and spend too much energy targeting that way. With Pinterest, you have the interest already, you don’t need to take the demographic cut to start, you have people who are already actively looking for your product and ideas related to your product,” Gilbreath noted on the data. “That’s the best marketing of all, demographics are often done when you don’t have information about your customer.”

In traditional marketing, Gilbreath noted, marketers have to go out and figure out who the likely user/user group is for their good or service. Pinterest — with its mix of user-generated content and smart SEO sorting — creates a better alternative by instead offering a space for the likely user to essentially come to you.

And it also lets that relationship develop organically over time. Instead of throwing up banner ads days in advance of a shopping event — or sales in the weeks ahead — Pinterest allows for a slower burn form of commerce that consistently and increasingly drives consumer purchasing across demographics over time.

“We’re seeing that for some of our clients that top traffic driving Pins are things Pinned a year ago. We haven’t seen that in marketing before, it’s hard to measure sometimes, but exciting and an unearned bonus that keeps going throughout time,” Gilbreath said.

The Changing Retail Environment

The way consumers shop — and the way marketing is done — has evolved incredibly quickly as more of commerce has become digital and moved to mobile. And, Gilbreath noted, it has changed the expectations of how consumers are approached and how they are most fruitfully approached.

It isn’t about just connecting consumers with goods in the digital age so much as it is about connecting with consumers and allowing their ideally customized shopping experience. Take, for example, one group with whom Pinterest is particularly popular: moms, who are much more complicated than just high waisted jeans and art supplies.

“This person is the chief household officer and they are buying everything from food, to fashion to even running entertainment,” he said.

Consumers want more than their goods, he noted, and instead are looking for the best way not only to buy, but also to decide what to buy and where to buy it. As a visual medium that is easy to search and customize, Pinterest is ideally suited for those consumers, Gilbreath said, and smart retailers have learned to help customers decide in their favor through the use of Pins.

“In a retail world where, let’s be honest, we’re all selling the same things. When retailers get someone into their store it’s about theater, it’s about solutions. You’re thinking about giving them the idea they never thought they could do, which is one of the ways people use Pinterest, they’re not looking for a specific idea all the time or typing in a specific search word They’re ready to be entertained, they’re ready to be exposed to a new idea.”

So how is Pinterest reinventing retail?

They’ve found a place to show consumers those new ideas, introduce them to new brands, and make the path to purchase that much shorter.