Pokemarketing – How to Use Pokemon Go to Attract Customers?

Kuba Rogalski
July 15, 2016 ・ 2 min read

If you’ve been following our blog closely, you probably noticed that we’ve also gotten a bit carried away with the Pokemon Go frenzy.

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Gotta catch ’em all!

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last week, you probably know that it’s the latest addition to the Pokemon franchise that has actually turned the gaming world upside down. What you need to set on a journey to become the Pokemon master is your smartphone with some data allowance and the geo-location feature turned on. The use of AR (augmented-reality) allows you to feel the Pokemon presence in the real world.

Although there’s a bit of skepticism among some of us, the rest can’t resist the urge to catch ’em all when they appear in our offices.  

While it’s already been settled that it’s simply hell of a fun, there are also ways in which businesses can use the game to bring more customers to their doors.

Now we’ve decided to do an experiment. Since we noticed there are five PokeStops around our office, we thought why not try to put some lure modules in all of them and see what it leads to. All it took was a 5-minute walk and a few hundreds of PokeCoins – an equivalent of $5 to be precise. 

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Within seconds, Pokemons started appearing both outside the building and right inside our offices.

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Even better, we’ve noticed more and more people coming into the area and they were there for a reason.

Who is pokemarketing for?

We agreed that while it’s not the best way to attract customers to SaaS companies like ours, it certainly can be used by bars, restaurants, cafes etc. We noticed a few lure modules active in the neighbourhood for the past few days and it seems pretty obvious why they are there, especially considering the fact that it’s the area of Wroclaw’s market square we’re talking about here.

There are a number of ways businesses could use the game to their advantage like the aforementioned lures, or some other bonuses they could provide like free Wi-Fi for the players walking into a shop, or discounts for members of a particular team (in case you don’t know it, once you reach level 5 you need to choose between Team Valor, Team Instinct, or Team Mystic). Sounds like plenty of opportunities to increase the cash flow, right?

We think the impact this game on different areas of people’s lives us pretty impressive, and it’s only been released recently. While everybody expected it to be a great gaming experience, nobody actually thought it could bring that much value to the marketing side of things. Hats off to those people who came up with all those brilliant ideas!