Amidst the whirlwind of world news, no matter who you are, you’ll most likely have seen and heard something about Pokémon Go. Perhaps you’ve seen crowds outside your house, at the pub, taking extra-long dog walks round your local park, and wondered what all the fuss is about.

For those of you who didn’t spend the 90’s swapping ‘Shineys’, Pokémon is short for the original Japanese title ‘Pocket Monsters’, a franchise that began in 1995 with a video game, and most popularly swept the UK with its trading cards and animated TV show.

The aim of Pokemon hasn’t changed – The trainer (you) finds and collects these little Pocket Monsters, and battles them in a Pokémon ‘gym’ – essentially a battle ground, where players go to train their Pokémon and face off against other teams. Except now we’re in augmented reality – so those little pocket monsters? They’re everywhere, appearing on our mobile phone screens as though in real world, via the use of your device’s GPS. As the Pokémon slogan says, you ‘Gotta catch ‘em all!’

Great! We all love a trip down memory lane, by why is this relevant to your business?

In its first week, there were 15.3 million tweets about Pokémon Go, beating the 11.7 million for Brexit in the week of the Referendum, and double the amount of tweets about the Euro 2016 Football Championships in its first seven days. Users are spending more time on average each day on Pokémon Go than most of the popular social media apps – Facebook, Intagram, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Snapchat.

This is an undeniable increasing craze, whether it’s a sustainable one or not. Instead of shying away from the foot traffic of hundreds of Pokémon hunters, why not use the opportunity to draw people to your business? If you own a business in retail, hospitality or one where you’re inviting people in to spend money, chances are you have Pokémon surrounding your building, and chances are you can find some way of using your creativity to turn hunters into paying customers. For a small high street businesses, this could be the kind of topical marketing activity that sets you apart from your big competitors. Your business might even be a gym, or a ‘PokéStop’ (where players can stock up on PokéBalls) meaning people might be crowding to get in your doors. Instead of feeling taken advantage of, be the business to take advantage of all these potential customers/clients.

Don’t know whether your business is swarming with Pokemon? Download the app and find out. You never know, you might even enjoy it…

 

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