McDonald's Japan: AR and IoT Marketing Strategy with Pokemon GO

This business case introduces the marketing campaign launched by McDonald’s Japan in July 2016, using the new smartphone version of the popular game Pokemon GO, whose extraordinary success attracted the attention of social platforms, businesses, and academic audiences. The alliance between McDonald’s Japan and Niantic-Pokemon is a good example of the social impact of modern games based on geolocation and augmented reality, and how this can embody new business models and marketing strategies. For McDonald’s Japan, this alliance attracted a large number of new consumers to its restaurants at a trivial cost. The results for the company were immediate and significant, driven by the community of 3.4 million game subscribers in Japan: it received 1.5 to 2 million daily visits across its 3,000 locations, had an estimated sales increase of 22%, and earned an increase in market capitalization of 9.8%. This marketing strategy connected the underlying culture of the former players of the first Pokemon GO for Nintendo DS with the values of the McDonald’s brand, attracting to the restaurants a new segment of customers aged from their mid-30s to their 40s as well as their children.