Pinterest Pins Its Hopes Overseas

Many very successful companies often find themselves in a position where their hugely successful product seems to not fit the needs of a market segment they are hoping to capture for growth. The website Pinterest is finding themselves in this exact position. While their United States market continues to be strong, they are having a hard time with overseas growth.

Pinterest Inc. is based out of San Francisco, California, and has over 500 employees, and has overseas offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and Sao Paulo, Brazil

Pinterest has been online for six years and has an $11 billion valuation. They have over 100 million monthly users, of which, 45% are international (Koh, 2016, p. B8). Their goal is to continue to grow their user

They are finding that the Pinterest users in these countries are not interested in the over 50 billion “Pins” that appear very American focused.

In an effort to communicate the importance of the international growth, Ben Silbermann, the Chief Executive of Pinterest, has weekly meetings with his staff discussing the importance of finding out how to strength the relationship with overseas users, and appeal to their interests. It is his goal to increase international Pinterest use to 50% of their total users, prior to the end of 2016. With this strategic determination to attract overseas usage, Pinterest is making a notable effort to make their site less American.

Jack Chou, the head of product for Pinterest, has spent the last year reaching out to users overseas to find out what they are interested in and finding ways to make international users more engaged with Pinterest. As Collis (2005) instructs, “communication is the most important implementation tool available” (Collis, 2005, p. 117). The only way for Pinterest to learn what international users want is to go to the users

They also featured recipes for ingredients there were commonly found in the United States, but not so easily found overseas. Another issue found, was that while Americans may be in love with their crockpot meals, other areas of the world never use crockpots. In many countries, steady, reliable electricity is still a luxury.

Pinterest even discovered that the usage of their own key jargon, “pins” and “boards”, was causing great confusion overseas. In Brazil, the translation leads to no connection of the idea of “pinning a picture to a board”. It is important for Pinterest to understand how their users interpret their message, and for them to use a diverse set of communication styles. Pinterest is also using this communication as a “two way proposition” (Collis, 2005, p. 119). They are taking this information back and changing the words that lead to confusion and changing them to be as simple as “save”.

Pinterest also discovered that while they have been making an effort to add international “pins” that was also adding to user stress, as it caused too many items for users to look at to get to relevant information. Pinterest took this feedback to give users an option to narrow their searches by language and