The other night I came across sweatshirt perfection, a cozy comfy sleep in it sweatshirt that I would have instantly investigated further, except for one thing, a $348 price tag, right there on the pin. Not only did that put the item way out of my price range, I also didn’t want to repin it. Because I am so totally not like “those people” that spend $350 to lounge. Now, the The High Low reports that my hesitancy to repin and click is (surprise!) not unique to me, at least as far as brands pinning price tags is concerned.
Not only is there already a start-up devoted to Pinterest analytics, Pinreach, but the company’s come to an interesting conclusion via a recent study — when brands post prices on pins, it’s a fairly bad idea.
What Pinreach wanted to find out was how having a price tag (which sits diagonally on the upper left hand corner of a pin) affected an item’s reception by the Pinterest community. Notably, the difference between a priced and non-priced pin, when posted by a regular user, was negligible. Out of a randomized sampling of 1 million user-generated pins, the average for re-pinning was around 5.4 instances, whether an item had a price or not.
However, when brands added prices to their pins, the amount of re-pinning dropped significantly. An unnamed luxury e-commerce site went from an average of 1.1 to .7, while a “major group buying site” saw re-pinning go down from 1.8 to a terrible .2, when items had prices. If that’s not a clear indicator to keep dollars signs off branded pins, we don’t know what is.
So, why the change? Well, when people include price tags with their pins, it’s merely sharing information. When brands do it, Pinreach concluded, it feels like advertising. And the site’s community isn’t buying it — they’re far less likely to share an item or demonstrate interest if it seems like they’re promoting something too commercial.
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Crosby- Are there any stats to show if consumers also feel this way about posting prices on facebook? What information doesn’t scare consumers? Is there a price limit? If something is under $300 is it okay to post the price?
I think it’s a bit different on Facebook as most often people like brand pages wanting product information (mainly sales and special offers). I think the problem right now is that brands are sort of invading Pinterest which until now has really been the domain of the people (for lack of a better term), and pinners are sensitive to the fact that the platform is primarily about discovery – so slapping on a price tag seems to immediately change the conversation from look at the pretty to buy the pretty, which, when done by a company, doesn’t really fit in with the community.
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[...] Fashion PR: New Research Suggests Brands Should Pin Sans Pricing (PRCouture) The reasoning behind this makes sense. I think it’s important for brands to at least include the link to the product. [...]
[...] Read the full story here: http://www.prcouture.com/2012/04/16/fashion-pr-new-research-suggest-brands-should-pin-sans-pricing/ [...]
[...] recently read this article on PRCouture.com about prices being displayed on Pinterest and I could not agree more. The [...]