Is that Pikachu in the dairy aisle?

© MIHAI ANDRITOIU – 123RF.com

Stories abound about the strange places players are showing up, improbable connections being forged and even police luring criminals to the booking room. Nintendo’s stock has more than doubled and game spending in the US alone is over $2 million per day just on iOS.

The economic impact, however, is much more significant than Nintendo stock and in-app purchases. Retailers and restaurants are seeing surges in traffic and sales, as players wander into the stores to capture the elusive characters.

How do you, as a demand-planning manager, quantify the impact Pikachu is having on sales? As a merchant, buyer, store manager or small business owner, how do you capitalise on the opportunity to grow those sales?

How long the craze will last and how significant the long-term impact on retail will be, are highly debatable. However, it behoves us in supply chain and demand management to take notice of the impact a digital trend can have on our supply chains.

Pokémon Go demonstrates a real breakthrough in the adoption of virtual reality in the mainstream. Perhaps more importantly it demonstrates how quickly a trend can catch fire in today’s digital world. In just days, Pokémon Go surpassed Twitter in terms of active daily users. How do we measure the impact of Pokémon Go on sales today, tomorrow, next week?

When we look back at 2016, how do we quantify or isolate the impacts associated with the early July surge?

Social network effect on demand planning

SNEW (social, news, events and weather) is an often thrown around acronym but to date there have only been largely isolated anecdotes highlighting the power of social networks on demand planning. The Pokémon Go phenomenon underscores the importance of including external factors in our demand plans to understand fully the influences at work.

If it is any indication of the pace at which new trends can emerge, then we had better all start taking notice and building plans for making social insights a core part of our demand management processes.

After all, nobody knows what the next major social impact on our businesses will be. However, we can be confident these networks have amazing power to shape demand and thus we must put in place systems and processes to harness the insights and leverage them to shape profitable demand.