When the vows are read, and the dancing is done, it’s probably reasonable to assume most brides would say the wedding was worth the stress. Make no mistake though, planning weddings is indeed stressful. But for users on Pinterest, it’s also incredibly fun, at least in the early stages.
Forty-million people turn to Pinterest for wedding planning, according to the platform’s own research. These people — pinners as they’re called — are saving nearly 1 billion wedding-related pins on the site, and are conducting 378 million wedding-related searches each year. About 27% of wedding planners spend more time each day planning their wedding on Pinterest than non-pinners who are planning a wedding.
And so the use case begins to become clear here: You’re a wedding business cognizant of both how stressful wedding planning can be, and how exciting the prospect of planning a wedding is for people in the early stages. You also know that Pinterest is a powerful destination throughout the planning process for tens of millions of people. The partnership practically creates itself, or it does if the “you” in this scenario is David’s Bridal.
“We know Pinterest is the first place the bride goes after she gets engaged — before she’s engaged actually — to begin curating ideas for her big day. She turns to the platform for ideas on her dress, her venue, and the overall look and feel of her wedding, and this campaign allows us to help provide a personalized point of view for her,” Sam Norpel, VP of commerce at David’s Bridal, said in an email interview.
The campaign in question was a quiz for prospective brides that lead to a personalized board on Pinterest. “The goal of the quiz is to help each bride take her first step in the planning process, and encourage her to have a little fun,” Norpel said.
The quiz asks non-standard questions of its participants, like “Who is your favorite celebrity bride,” and “What’s the moment you can’t wait for.”
In addition to their practical applications for personalization, this line of questioning is visually evocative — a cornerstone of Pinterest.
“One of the most important things we wanted to create was an experience that was aspirational, and something [pinners] can go out and do in the real world,” says Raashi Rosenberger, creative strategy lead for the East Coast at Pinterest Studio.
The end result is the fun, fluid test users can still take now. But distilling the campaign’s goals — to ease the pain of early wedding planning by personalizing content for a customer, and to illicit an emotional response from that customer — into a single, pithy quiz took a lot of work from both Pinterest and David’s Bridal.
For David’s Bridal this was a challenge in strategy. Making sure the brand had ample data to inform the selection of questions and creative that would ultimately pull in more data and drive the personalized boards.
“We know our bride spends a lot of time on the [Pinterest]. Leveraging the data we have, both from customer insights we’ve done as a company and from Pinterest, was a huge part of our consideration in building the quiz, from the types of questions we asked to the kinds of creative we included in the pin outputs,” Norpal said.
Pinterest’s role was aligned, but a bit more technical.
“This was a very impressive use of the Pinterest developer API. We saw that the personalization that DB was able to use was a really nice activation of the technical features that we offer,” Rosenberger says. “[Brides] also had a pin where they could actually schedule an appointment to go and get a dress fitting at David’s Bridal, so there’s a really nice call to action there.”
The ultimate impact of the quiz on David’s Bridal’s business is yet to be determined, as the campaign is still relatively new. However, it has already proven a powerful driver of organic engagement, and that’s exactly what David’s Bridal was after.
“[David’s Bridal] has seen incredible organic engagement since the campaign kicked off, which is what they were looking for,” Rosenberger says. “Success for us is hearing that our brides are finding the quiz to be useful and fun,” Norpal added.
