Activate Old Habits with New Technology - Delivering on the Promise

What happened on xxx was that million of users who ALREADY played Pokemon in the past on their suddenly had a new and more engaging way to play the "same old game".  None of the concept really changed, just the location - Nintendo evolved a video game to more closely match the "real-world" Pokemon. If you ever spent time watching the TV series Pokemon as a kid or with your kids, you'll exactly what I mean.  You can actually say the series has been preparing fans for this eventuality for years! Pokéman Go is not a new game, its actually the an old game you finally play more correctly. Pokémon has been around for 20 years and technology has finally evolved to be able to simulate a world in which Pokémon are as about as "real" as it gets.

Opportunities and Applications: Find offline activities your users, fan or customers are familiar and provided new "connect" ways to recreate or enhance those activities. Perhaps its the nostalgia associated with xxxx

 

"Offline" is the new Online - Bridging the Gap
Face it, we are always online! Our mobile phones provide us with almost constant connectivity, so especially if you could texting in the mix, your fans, users or customers are almost always immediately accessible.  Pokeman Go takes users xxxxx but these users are always connected

 

This is a True Paradigm Shift: For Real!

There are very few real paradigm shifts, but lots of people who like to use the word, but on Saturday 9, 2016 millions of people went outside (some perhaps for the first time) and walked around (burning calories and breathing fresh) for hours and they didn't know it.  Many people, including my kids, repeated this ritual several times that same day, something that was previously unheard of, even in legend.  Thousands more got it your cars, many with families, and drove aimless around town, looking for imaginary featured and battling imaginary foe.  Few technology events have the power to actually change or control human behavior, this was one of them.  @Morganhhart sort of summed it up best on Twitter when she posted: Pokemon go got more kids to do exercise in 24 hours then Michelle Obama did in 8 years!

 

Don't be afraid to use to leverage your online relationships to "drive"

Pokemon Go demonstrate that is the prize is attractive enough, you'll be succesful.

 

"Failure" can be the mother of Success: How to Phoenix and Piggy-Back your Way to Riches
Five years ago, Niantic was peddling a game called Ingress that "helped users all around the world have fun, socialize, and get more fit" - it didn't exactly do well because people have no big interesting in going out and getting fit, but it did have a unique approaches to solving its problems and building internal value. It started its pool of portal locations for its game using historical markers and public artwork mined from geo-tagged photos on Google.  This is a smart, sort of "piggy approach" that more company should be trying to use - don't reinvent the wheel simply borrow one and preferably from neighbor or even your former boss! (the Niantic original worked on Google Earth) They also asked users to submit locations (the received 15 million submissions and approved about 5 million locations worldwide).  Soon they had a massive mapping data for mobile games that co-mingle with the real world that nobody had or could afford to create.  Guess what, fast forward to 2016 and much of the real-world data for Pokémon Go - where you find the cartoon characters to capture and what have you - comes from Ingress! Its a classic phoenix-like strategy, from the ashes of one game, comes another!  Without Ingress that would have been no Pokémon Go.

Opportunities and Applications:

• Your data or other "hidden" assets may be the greatest potential source of value for your company or brand.  Just because your current "application" may not be a success, your ability to pivot or "to phoenix" and leverage your true assets may be the secret to your future success.
• Sometimes in order to succeeded you must first properly fail! If Ingress has succeeded, chances are we would not have had Pokémon Go!  In fact many times complete failure may be preferable to mediocre success.
• Do not underestimate crowd sourcing as a way of collecting valuable information and building value, in fact, gamify the process and try and turn your users or fans into value sources of data, competitive information and marketing. Be smart like Niantic and make sure your "legal language" makes it it clear you own their data and can use it for pretty much anything you want, and like Niantic you don't always have to make it obvious where your data is actually coming from.
• Need data or data points, then piggyback on what is already out there! For example use existing Starbucks locations as xxxxx

 

However, it was the most downloaded smartphone app in the U.S. in its first three days of release

 

There is always a dark side to every new technology so beware.  Criminals have already started using the application to lure and identify targets.