No doubt about it: the folks at Nintendo know a thing or two about timing.
In partnership with Niantic Labs, Nintendo released the newest in a long, successful line of Pokémon products the first week of July. The augmented reality mobile exploration game Pokémon Go runs off a HUD, or heads-up display, of the real world.
To say the smartphone app caught on is an understatement of epic proportions. To say it “went viral” also doesn’t quite do it justice. Let’s just go with unprecedented popularity and leave it at that.
Back to the issue of timing. Let’s say Nintendo had waited until, hmm, maybe the first week of December. Same game system, same marketing package, same brand. Would we expect their market value to be shooting through the roof within a week? Guess we’ll never know for sure, but chances are extremely high that results from a December launch would not have mirrored the reality of the July launch. I’m betting it wouldn’t even be close.
Do people not like Pokémon in December? Hardly the issue. It’s a given that Pokémon appears on many a Christmas list. Rather it’s a simple matter of weather and the calendar.
The nature of the new mobile game begs for the carefree, warm-weather days of summer. If tweens, teens and college students had been immersed in academic pursuits when Go released, they wouldn’t have had the time to seek after Pokémon or battle other players. And if snow, sleet, and ice awaited gamers on the other side of their front door, those less enthusiastic players would have simply stayed home.
Mid-summer, when the weather’s fine and the “newness” of summer has worn off – about the time the first choruses of “I’m bored…” have been sung – was the absolute perfect time to launch a time-intensive, get’em out of the house kind of game.
And let’s not forget the nostalgia factor. February 27, 2016, marked the twentieth anniversary of the original Japanese release of the Pokémon Red and Green Versions. The entirety of 2016 is set to celebrate Pokémon’s 20th Anniversary. Scores of youngsters who cut their “gaming” eye teeth on those early versions of Pokémon are now the proud, tech-savvy owners of smartphones. And they love their mobile devices so much; they rarely put them down.
It would seem Nintendo hit the timing jackpot on every front. An outstanding example of what it means to hit the right place at the right time with the right consumer in the right frame of mind.
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