The meteoric growth of Pokémon Go has presented a fertile testing ground for financial institutions considering applying gamification and location-based services to their member acquisition strategy. At its core, the Pokémon Go phenomenon should be viewed as an opportunity to experiment with gamification as a way to support business growth by connecting with potential and existing millennial members, influencing foot traffic at branches, improving overall financial literacy and building a future member base.

There has been a lot of broad discussion around the business applications of Pokémon Go. Here are some questions to consider as you define your experiments at the outset:

How does this fit into your strategy in terms of branch traffic goals balanced with moving members to digital channels?
Will you bring in meaningful traffic?
What are the security concerns related to people coming into the branch and snapping photos?

This is the time for exploration – a time for developing a few hypotheses and setting up experiments that will help inform decisions down the road. As you’re defining what you want to test and why, it’s important to establish metrics that will help you calibrate whether they’re likely to be effective in attaining your goals.

Pokémon Go Crash Course

For the uninitiated, Pokémon is an augmented reality, mobile-exploration game, and the object of the game is to capture as many types of Pokémon characters as possible. These characters can be found in many places like public parks, national monuments, bus stations and of course, at bank and credit union branches. Poké Balls, the mechanism in which these creatures are captured, are acquired at physical locations – known as PokéStops – that are found on an in-game map reflecting users’ physical surroundings. The GPS on users’ mobile phones detect when they are near a PokéStop. Users can also purchase Lures, a module that “plugs in” to a PokéStop to attract Pokémon. Any user who is nearby can then capture the Pokémon.

How Financial Institutions Can Get Started

As an augmented reality game, Pokémon Go combines the physical and the digital world in a fun, approachable environment. If your branch is near a designated PokéStop, using Lures to attract Pokémon, and thus users, is an easy first step to potentially bring in new members. Lures are inexpensive but only last 30 minutes, so timing is key. Credit unions should consider employing Lures during off-peak hours or during branch events, making sure to alert members via their social media platforms or at branch location to build anticipation.

Here is a breakdown of how to combine the use of Lures with other methods of engagement for the biggest benefit:

Post on social media if you’re near a PokéStop or Gym. Use hashtags like #pokemon and #pokemongo to reach beyond your followers. Ask members to share photos of Pokémon they’ve captured around your branches.
Create community challenges. Consider rewarding users for hatching eggs by walking. About 81% of more than 90,000 surveyed said they are walking more than normal to hatch eggs. Set goals and create teams, competitions and rewards for eggs hatched. Give users a map of small business clients within walking distance where they can pick up promotions for hatched eggs.

Pick a team. If you’re near a Gym, keep score, or simply pick a team color and identify a potential reward.
Do giveaways. Consider Pokémon giveaways either to bring people to a specific community event or to the branch.

Create a teaching tool. Help visitors hunt Pokémon while teaching them how to use different services in the branch.
Utilize Yelp reviews. Yelp recently added a filter for PokéStop locations. Check your Yelp reviews and build up your reputation.

Putting baseline metrics in place will help determine if this is something to continue. Possible metrics include in-branch traffic, engagement, new product or member sign-ups, member satisfaction, positive brand recognition or incremental sales at your small business clients’ locations. Ideally, this sparks other ideas for member engagement.

Coming Soon

Niantic plans to continue evolving the game and has promised to deliver additional features that could bring greater impact to your Pokémon Go strategy, including the ability to trade Pokémon with other users to potentially increase their value. As a financial institution, offering free in-branch trading is one way to get in the game. Niantic may also allow businesses to become sponsored locations, which would allow branches to pay to become a PokéStop.

The Potential Role of Gaming in Your Credit Union’s Future

Pokémon Go is a great way to get initiated into gaming and augmented reality as a member relationship tool. With Facebook’s Oculus, Samsung Gear, Google’s Magic Leap and countless other products in market or on the horizon, these technologies will transform how users see and connect with the world. It’s worth exploring how both gaming and augmented/virtual reality might come to the fore as a way to engage members. Imagine:

Bringing your own characters to life, like your financial institution’s mascot. Create your own PokéStops at small business client locations or a teaching tool for kids.
Putting your financial institution into an existing immersive environment like the game Second Life, where people can visit a virtual branch and be exposed to virtual advertisements.
Combining augmented reality and geolocation to guide visitors into your branch.

Pokémon also incorporates many gaming concepts that you can consider applying to loyalty programs or use to help create healthy financial habits. Some of the sticky behaviors Pokémon taps into are about collecting, competition, variable ratio/interval (i.e. a rare Pokémon showing up unexpectedly), status, loss aversion and social feedback loops through add-ons like GoChat.

There is a lot of potential on the horizon to explore if usage continues to grow as the game matures. This is a great opportunity to jump in, experiment and learn your way into the world of gamification, interactive mobile experiences and augmented reality to take your members’ experiences beyond mobile banking. Have fun, and keep those metrics in mind.

Jose Resendiz is vice president and general manager for Digital Insight, an NCR Company. He can be reached at 800-225-5627 or jose.resendiz@ncr.com.

Instant Insights /

Gateway to Gamification: Using Pok&eacute;mon Go to Connect With Consumers

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Gateway to Gamification: Using Pokémon Go to Connect With Consumers