E-commerce 2021: business. technology. society.

KENNETH C. LAUDON AND CAROL G. TRAVER

video case
chapter 7 Social, Mobile, and Local
Marketing
case 7.1 Pinterest
watch the
video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7knUves_008

summary These videos feature examples of the ways

businesses, large and small, are using
Pinterest. This video features a large and
very well-known business, Home Depot.
L: 1:38

watch the
video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksbKU7lRrZI

summary This video features Jonas Paul, a small

startup focused on children’s eyewear.
L: 1:43

case Pinterest is a rapidly growing social network that allows users to “pin” pictures to
their own online board, creating a highly interactive and social online scrapbook.
The site offers a wide array of content categories, including fashion, animals, art,
cars, and food. Pinterest is one of the fastest growing sites in the history of the
Web and has quickly become a staple of marketing campaigns for companies

continued

Copyright © 2022 Kenneth C. Laudon and Carol Guercio Traver. This work is protected by United States copyright laws and is provided solely for
the use of instructors in teaching their courses and assessing student learning. Dissemination or sale of any part of this work in any form, including
online, for any other purpose is not permitted. This work should not be made available to students except by instructors using the accompanying
text in their classes. All recipients of this work are expected to abide by these restrictions and to honor its pedagogical purpose.
7.1: Pinterest 2

with products that can be represented visually. In 2012, Pinterest had just 10,000
users, but in 2020, it had over 440 million users.

Because Pinterest users are specifically hoping to generate ideas about things
to buy, companies with large advertising budgets have all flocked to Pinterest to
tap into this valuable audience. One company that has been on the forefront of
Pinterest marketing is Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the
United States. Home Depot primarily offers products that are visual in nature,
making the company an excellent fit for Pinterest. However, many of Home
Depot’s products show homes and gardens after a home improvement project has
been finished; customers often want to see the transformation from “before” to
“after.”

To that end, Home Depot has taken advantage of some of Pinterest’s newer pin
formats, including Built-In Pins, which can contain media such as 30-second
time lapse videos, fully three-dimensional images that allow Pinterest users to
look “inside” a room, and the ability to identify individual items within a room that
they might like to buy. Home Depot has also experimented with other forms of
augmented reality, including the ability to artificially place items within a room in
your house, such as a Christmas tree, just to see how it might look. The ads much
more effectively capture the process of renovating a room or otherwise upgrading
a home than traditional still images.

Pinterest is also a hugely valuable resource for smaller companies hoping to

jumpstart their growth. The subject of the first video, Jonas Paul Eyewear, is a
children’s eyewear company founded in 2013 by Ben and Laura Harrison and
named after the couple’s son, Jonas. They founded the company when they
struggled to find fashionable eyeglasses for Jonas, who was born legally blind
and now has minimal vision capability after many surgeries. Jonas Paul Eyewear
has grown rapidly since then, forging a successful partnership with Walmart to
place their products in stores, but the company does much of its business online.
Eyeglasses are an excellent candidate for a visual search platform like Pinterest,
and Jonas Paul considers Pinterest to be a core component of its marketing
efforts.in a particular area.

video case
1. How many unique Built-in Pins did Home Depot create as part of its Pinterest
questions
marketing efforts?

continued

Copyright © 2022 Kenneth C. Laudon and Carol Guercio Traver. This work is protected by United States copyright laws and is provided solely for
the use of instructors in teaching their courses and assessing student learning. Dissemination or sale of any part of this work in any form, including
online, for any other purpose is not permitted. This work should not be made available to students except by instructors using the accompanying
text in their classes. All recipients of this work are expected to abide by these restrictions and to honor its pedagogical purpose.
7.1: Pinterest 3

2. How many views and clicks to site did Home Depot’s 360-degree pins
generate?

3. What is Jonas Paul’s customer demographic and what is this demographic

looking for on Pinterest?

4. How does Jonas Paul’s order value generated by Pinterest traffic compare to
order value generated by other marketing platforms?

Copyright © 2022 Kenneth C. Laudon and Carol Guercio Traver. This work is protected by United States copyright laws and is provided solely for
the use of instructors in teaching their courses and assessing student learning. Dissemination or sale of any part of this work in any form, including
online, for any other purpose is not permitted. This work should not be made available to students except by instructors using the accompanying
text in their classes. All recipients of this work are expected to abide by these restrictions and to honor its pedagogical purpose.