Is Pokémon GO Just What Retailers Need?

It’s no secret that consumer confidence has been shaken since the vote to leave the EU, and whilst footfall was already in decline, the trend has been reinforced over the past few weeks.

It would appear though, that Nintendo’s Pokemon Go game has managed to pull us out of this pattern and shoppers are once again returning to the high street. Players are visiting towns, landmarks, shops and restaurants in search of Pokemon monsters. The game is sending people to areas that they wouldn’t normally visit and therein lies the secret weapon that the high street could benefit from – a drive in footfall and ultimately sales.

So how can retailers use this momentum to engage shoppers and encourage them through the doors? A little knowledge of the game shows that ‘PokeStops’ attract foot traffic without any effort. Players will search them out to collect their next monster, so by turning your store or venue in to a PokeStop you can hope to increase footfall without breaking in to a sweat.

For a small fee within the app, quick thinking retailers can purchase a ‘Lure’ which turns a store or location in to a special PokeStop for 30 minutes at a time. By becoming a PokeStop in the first week of the launch, Maxwells Bar in Covent Garden reported a 26% increase in customers.

Mobile phone stores have been quick to use the power of Pokemon; Three has been using the game to promote its ‘all-you-can-eat’ data plan and T-Mobile have offered a promotion via its T-Mobile Tuesday app for customers to receive free data for a year when using the Pokemon Go app.

Gamification is another tool that retailers can use to drive traffic to their physical stores through the power of mobile technology. Pokemon Go has taken it to another scale of popularity.

If marketing teams are quick to jump on trends and engage their customers, the potential to attract footfall and increase sales is considerable.

With McDonald’s sponsoring the recent location launch in Japan, the first time that a company has been an official partner, and with Nintendo now looking at other ways for brands to advertise via the app, the possibilities, for now, seem endless.