Pokémon Go in Marketing – An Academic Case-Example

In short: how we used Pokémon Go to market our Research Group.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock – inside a Faraday cage, on Mars – you’ve surely at least superficially familiar with Pokémon Go. Seemingly overnight, everybody started chasing around those little monster-pets with their smartphones.

Streets full of people, basically.

Not in my day…

Of course, there have been some knee-jerk reactions. Sensational headlines about people almost getting run over by cars, or general anti-fad rah-rah. Here in Finland, the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper ran an opinion piece about how youngster would be better of spending their time and energy chasing after wild berries rather than imaginary pets.

That sparked quite a lively discussion, to say the least. On a general level, I actually agree. Berries are all kinds of healthy and tasty, and probably everybody should eat more of them. Unfortunely, picking them sucks big time – it’s like a constant nightmare of back-ache and dizziness especially for someone with hips as tight as mine. But I digress.

Not just for fun

Nevertheless, for the time being, Pokémon Go is here to stay. And unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for people to start wondering how to make money out if it. Small cafe owners set up phone-charging stations inside their premises, and online marketing professionals hurriedly scraped together blog-posts about other approaches.

Me, occasionally being denser than a neutron star, mostly skimmed through all of this before proceeding into something infinitely more interesting, like pictures of cats.

It wasn’t until took a part in a Twitter chat that things changed. Long story short, a marketing pro ran a chat for online community managers. I, de-facto filling that role for our research group, obviously took part.

In the chat, one of the participants asked how we could utilize this Pokémon thing in marketing.

Marketing 101 for academics

And I started to wonder how indeed.

How could we use this to advertise our Research Group?

My first idea was to set up a stop or a gym on our corridor. Obviously, I was not aware how these things worked back then. Luckily, my dear colleagues quickly brought me up to date.

For those unfamiliar, you can’t. At least not at the moment. You used to be able to request a Pokémon stop to be set up, but the company behind the game was quickly swamped with these kind of requests. At the moment, no new requests are accepted.

So, we opted for the next best thing.

If we could not set up a stop of our own, we would use an existing one. And luckily for us, there were quite a few nearby.

Since we don’t really have a marketing budget, so we chose the way with the lowest investment.

A paper ad.

A simple ad with the name of our Research Group, and a link to our Facebook page. A print that we designed and printed ourselves. Time spent: less than one hour.

I then tiptoed to the nearest stop and taped out masterpiece on. Behold its magnificence below!

Yeah yeah, there are probably a zillion things wrong with all this according to graphic designers and the like. I give exactly zero fraks about that.

Results

By now, you probably want some hard numbers. But, let me first set the scale for you. We are a small research group in a niche field in a small country. Our courses usually have something like 10 students – often even less. Our Facebook page has a little over 100 likes, with a typical reach of one thousand. It’s still a nice improvement from where we started, but we are no Apple yet.

Bearing that in mind, take a look at our page views within the last month or so.

Guess on which day the ad went on-line. (Or on-resonator, to be exact.) Hint: It’s the obvious one.

That there is a 13-times increase compared to the average number of daily views. And an infinite-times increase to the worst days.

And it still seems to be continuing. The ad itself has probably been washed off by rain and wind by now. But it’s still making waves.

Indeed, one of hour summer employees even spotted it in a campus discussion group. You can find the screenshot below. It’s in Finnish, but they are basically over-awed by how sexy and wonderful we are. Trust me.

Conclusion

Obviously, this little campaign alone probably won’t make us the most popular major this Autum. But, as I’ve written before – every small bit will count in the long run. Already now, we are significantly less obscure than we were a year ago.

And if we can keep on utilizing little opportunities such as this (which was basically served on a plate for us) – we can keep inching forwards.

Got any ideas how to make us even more awesome? Hit me a comment!

-Antti

Pokémon Go in Marketing – An Academic Case-Example