In case you haven’t heard, pokemon Go is a game developed by an arm of Nintendo. It has barely been around for about one month at the time of this writing but has more active users per day than Twiter according to a data mining company.
Pokemon Go has been in the news everyday for about three weeks now for both good and bad reasons. Well, this post will neither serve as bad news nor good news. It is simply written to highlight the accounting, finance and business strategy lessons to be learnt from the game called Pokemon Go.
Pokemon Go took the gaming world by surprise just when we think that the gaming industry is saturated. This game was able to do this because it ventured into area that no other game has ventured.
The rest of this article will look at the accounting, finance and business strategy to learn from Pokemon Go.
Use of lures
Pokemon Go did not just tell users to go out and about in order to play the game as this would not work – ask many fitness apps that tell you to go walking 10 to 15 km a day if they succeded. Rather, pokemon Go used lure to get people out of their comfort zone- even politicians like Cobyn in the UK who was reportedly found playing Pokemon God in a park.
Businesses should learn to use lures to attract people to them. Come to think of it, do you know that you can liaise with Nintendo (sponsored location) to have some of their pokes/lures in your place of business so as to attract more people traffic to your business- depending on your kind of business though i.e Restaurant and recreational centers can use this strategy to bring in flocks of prospective customers.
The only thing to bear in mind is that the lure that a business intends to use as bait must be what people really value. A worthless commodity (virtual or real) will not attract anyone.
Actively engaging people
Pokemon Go is not only asking you to use up your brain power to play the game. It encourages its players to also be active and engaged. I recently read about the health benefits of playing pokemon Go which includes having healthy heart as people tend to walk miles in search of pokemon without knowing it and this turns out to be helping their blood circulation.
People love to be actively engaged in whatever they do especially in this modern day and age where technology has made us do less active work.
Importance of planning for uncommon success
Well, it is no longer news that the makers of Pokemon Go did not anticipate the level of success that the game has enjoyed.
This is evidenced by the incident of their server crashing severally and the game temporarily going offline before they upgraded their systems. Having a sort of contingent plan and robust capacity management in place would have greatly reduced the downtime that they experienced.
Carefully managing your product rollout
This is continuing from the point made above. Pokemon Go did not manage their rollout carefully otherwise they would not have run into the problem that they had. Businesses should proactively manage their product rollout in such a way that too much strain would not be placed on their resources.
The server crash would have been avoided if the rollout had been done differently. The initial buzz that came with the game would wane out with time thereby freeing some computing power and other resources.
Building in safety measures in your business
I won’t be surprised if some smart lawyers start making cool money for their clients in the coming weeks and months. We have heard of cases where people collide with vehicles and other moving objects while playing Pokemon Go.
Health and safety standards require that every care in taken to ensure that users of our products are reasonably safe. It can be argued that the number of accident relating to the use of pokemon Go can be greatly reduce if some sort of sensor device is built in to warn gamers when moving object is coming their way or when they are dangerously moving towards a moving object.
Safety of stakeholder should be at the forefront of managing any business venture as the cost of neglecting safety can be very expensive.
Benefiting by invoking traditions and monumental places
The success of Pokemon Go is to an extent linked to the fact that pokemons are found in monumental places. People like to be reminded of important facts and figures about their environments. Pokemon Go did just that.
Businesses should start touching the lives of people by invoking traditions and monumental places and events.
Final word!!
If you have not been learning business strategies from games, you are probably not running a successful business because games have traditionally been a powerful business strategy tools that business legends have used in the past. This is why ‘game theory’ are thought in most business schools.
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