Friday, April 21, 2017

Not Another Social Media Site: How Pinterest is Rebranding Itself

According to a report released by Bloomberg Technology on April 21st, Pinterest, the photo catalog based social media site much beloved by DIY-ers and inspiration seekers worldwide will be launching its first ever U.S. advertising campaign in the Summer of 2017. While, at least from my own perspective, it seems rather odd to put advertising efforts towards promoting a social media site, especially one as widely known as Pinterest, the campaign is more an effort to reshape the general public's view of Pinterest and move away from the social media site label, effectively rebranding the site.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-21/pinterest-to-start-its-first-u-s-advertising-campaign

In an interview for Bloomberg's Decrypted podcast series, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann states a desire to shift towards marketing Pinterest as a "visual search engine" rather than a social media site, especially since Pinterest is geared more towards idea sharing and less on generating social interaction or attempting to boost "likes" and "follows." Essentially, the goal is to situate Pinterest as a site where consumers can go to collect ideas, concepts, projects, and even products that they'd like to try out and store them for quick and simple access.

Personally, I think that this is a wise decision on Pinterest's part, especially as I've noticed that Pinterest does generate as much buzz as other similar sites like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram do simply because the site is labeled as a social media site but has few social components to its structure. Pinterest has apparently had great success with a similar rebranding campaign launched in London in 2016 featuring television and billboard-esque ads, however, I'm still not entirely convinced that such a campaign could be measurable effective in altering user's perceptions of Pinterest. I look forward to hopefully seeing the campaign when it makes its debut and I can only hope that Pinterest proves me wrong.

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