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.
