'Businesses are ready to pay for customers' - 18 Jul 2016

Pokemon GO has taken the world by storm, a week in and already looking to influence retail in a big way. With its 'lure module' feature, restaurants, coffee shops and small retailers are able to attract virtual Pokemon characters to the store and therefore new customers too. Reuters reports: "L'inizio Pizza Bar in Long Island City in New York claims its sales jumped 75% over the weekend by activating the feature. The store's manager spent $10 to have a dozen Pokemon characters placed in the location, according to a report in the New York Post."

Estelle Nagel believes that through the #CheckersLittleShop campaign, the retailer is teaching kids a valuable lesson about commerce, just not the one they think... But rather that businesses are ready to pay for customers. This certainly holds true for L'inizio Pizza Bar.

Keeping to the subject of pizza, on Friday Debonairs announced its 'doughnation' drive on Facebook, encouraging customers to buy more pizza over the weekend so that they could donate more flat breads made of off-cuts to the needy today. While mostly met with favourable responses, the chain drew a few negative ones accusing it from trying to profit from the charity project.

On that note, and on the back of BrandsEye's Brexit accomplishment, whereby the media analytics company accurately predicted the outcome of the Brexit vote over and above its competitors, the polls and pundits, Sindy Peters reports back on Melanie Malherbe's talk at the Nedbank Franchising Seminar. She covered social listening and sentiment analysis, and how "just listening in on a conversation, using social media and just getting in on people's minds can actually make a difference to your day-to-day business".

This week for #MandelaMonth, I interview Unilever's Sibonile Dube on the FMCG company's new integrated brightFuture Schools Programme, and KFC's Cathy Qama on Add Hope - its all-year-round national feeding initiative. Happy Mandela Day!