Effective Marketing Lessons to learn from Pokémon Go!

Abhishek Shah
ThugStart
Published in
3 min readJul 29, 2016

Pokémon is not a new name to the people who love to watch cartoons and enjoy spending time with kids’ shows. Similarly, if you are crazy about the Pokémon, you might be the one among those, who are concentrating on their Smartphone screen and being indulge with Pokémon Go mobile gaming. However, if you have not heard about the fun and excitement of this gaming, then get up and check your near world, seems you are out of technology.

A Glimpse on Pokémon Go journey

Talking specifically about the Pokémon Go application, it is a reality-based gaming app loaded with the excitement and fun. The superficial involvement of people in this game is a matter of discussion as it has achieved a tremendous popularity over the past years. After its launch in the first week of July 2016 for Android and iOS, Nintendo evaluation has reached approx $7.5 billion

Quick lessons of Pokémon Go Marketing

Obviously, nothing goes viral without a carrier. The game started getting surprisingly high download and reached millions of users across the selected countries. The credit is for the marketing strategies for the app and its relativity with the exciting mobile platforms. We can extract few tips for our products and company’s promotion:

  1. Selling starts with Good Branding: Pokémon Go, selected Ingress system, which is already used for many other location-based games and Apps. However, many people are not aware with Ingress as Brand, but Pokémon had been continuously upgrading its Brand value. With over 20 years of its launch, noticeable changes have been seen it is gaming quality, character design, video game series and deliverables. Despite of the game quality, the branding is a base reason why Pokémon Go is ruling over all the age groups.
  2. Time Preference: Customer study is another theory that Pokémon Go has implemented so well. Pokémon had launched during the initial days of summers. This is the best time when kids are free to the school, holidays are approaching and people are busy with the vacation plans. If they could have launched the game during winters, the responses might be weak. Although, it does not matter much for Pokemon as it already has a good fan following since years, but still the timing is an important factor to consider.
  3. Social Attention: Being the highly populated, most communicative and virally integrated online space, social media has proved to be the successful promotional channels for Pokémon Go. People were seen to connect the groups for the latest launches and are sharing their exciting stories. Their team put equal care on responding to queries, sharing fun and communicating the users for game upgrades.
  4. The sense of Feeling and Identity: Pokémon Go succeeded to bind the user, this is because they keep upgrading the games features and kept the original feeling of the users same. User feel noticed when they play for a specific country. Another factor is providing loyalty. The users can select their rival based on the identification of willing and defeating faction. It is similar to sports where you know about a strong team.
  5. Do not plan a big Advertisement Budget: Pokémon team had hardly invested on Displaying Advertisements might be because they know the principle that connecting people is the major factor.
  6. Offering rewards to loyal customers: In Pokémon Go, every customer receives attractive rewards during the game; some may be in the form of incentives or bonus. When a customer invests with you, rewards help in retargeting them.

Above all, keeping close eyes on every platform, user feedback, and their resolution is the prime key noticed during the Pokémon Go promotions. We hope these marketing clues can help you plan your own campaign in a better ways.

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Abhishek Shah
ThugStart

Nomad | Early Stage Investor | Wannabe Anthropologist | Technology Evangelist | Curious, Inquisitive & Experimental Entrepreneur