Pinterest is not only a millennial-favorite tool to curate dream wedding or apartment aesthetics, but a place consumers—increasingly Gen Z consumers—are discovering brands and products, and eventually, making purchases.
Of the searches pinners make, 96% are not branded (rather than “Nike running shoes” they’re looking for “new shoes,” for example), indicating a “fertile open mind” that makes them welcoming of all content, including ads, how Pinterest makes it revenue, Carrie Sweeney, Pinterest’s VP of retail who works with its 300 retail clients, told Retail Brew. Therefore, Pinterest has been working to make all surfaces on the platform seamlessly shoppable, and Sweeney shared the platform’s strategy for working with retailers and bringing in new shoppers.
Pinterest doesn’t convert sales on its site like platforms like Instagram. Can you share why that is?
We thought about it a lot. Certainly to each their own, and social commerce is such an interesting space right now…We don’t want to compete with retailers. We want to be a retailer’s best friend. We feel like we have our strength in the value chain of that inspiration and moving them through the middle of the funnel, which is no longer a funnel. It’s such a journey…We just really found that we don’t want to be in the business of checkout and fulfillment and all those other retail expertises. We have ours, they have theirs, and we’d rather pass them off to do it well. We’ve absolutely dabbled in different types of native checkout and commerce, and there’s a lot of ways we can keep doing seamless handoff and really frictionless and fast handoffs to the retailer so the user will barely notice that they’re leaving. We just didn’t feel like it needed to happen on us. It wasn’t authentic; why force a user to convert on us when there are many other platforms that are ready and willing to convert on?
You have a Gen Z audience that's growing. Is that a selling point when you’re meeting with retailers about advertising?
Absolutely. So many of our retailers are so sophisticated, they’re very aware that they need to protect and safeguard their loyalists, and especially in the case of some department stores, some large mega mass merchants—a lot of that is an older mom or a woman in her 30s and 40s who’s controlling the purse strings for her entire family and buying clothes. So we certainly never neglect them, and we certainly have that demographic, but it’s been so fun to see this Gen Z [audience] develop, and all these retailers are very aware that that’s the next generation of loyal customers they’re cultivating. So we’ve always found that when we look at the numbers, Pinterest has a unique spot that we’re equally powerful at keeping customers loyal to a brand and helping them keep engaging with that brand, as well as adding new-to-file customers to retailers. Someone who hasn’t converted on Walmart or isn’t a loyal Walmart shopper will encounter the brand on Pinterest and convert for the first time, and then maybe that spark of a relationship [will occur] between a younger Gen Z audience member and the retailer.
Retail news that keeps industry pros in the know
Retail Brew delivers the latest retail industry news and insights surrounding marketing, DTC, and e-commerce to keep leaders and decision-makers up to date.
What do you feel like is the biggest challenge that you’re facing?
When we see a challenge, we turn it into an opportunity. We were playing with a standalone app that our innovation team built last year called Shuffles, and they launched it in the Apple App Store… It was based around the premise of a mood board, cutting out your favorite images and then making your own collages. It went viral with Gen Z, so we built that functionality into Pinterest, which also helped us with that audience…When someone said, “What’s the future of shopping?” We said, “We don’t know.” We just watch our trends and our users really closely, and they were so passionate about this collage functionality. We were like, “Okay, they want more than to just save a static rectangular pin.” You might see a pin with all these different images, but you just want the chair or the bag or the couch. Now people can cut those out in every pin and create their own mood boards and then everything is shoppable. What could have been a challenge is: How do you innovate the app to not only remain relevant, but become even more relevant with younger, notoriously tough audiences? That would seem like a really hard challenge. And we listened to our pinners. We stayed true to what we’re good at. We launched a standalone app and then pulled in the good parts into Pinterest, and it became this really powerful, native way to tap into the future of shopping and the future of what gets Gen Z excited to engage with brands.