Pokémon
The outrageously popular Pokémon franchise is probably one of the most successful media franchises of our generation. Indeed, Nintendo’s brainchild, which was created in 1996, has now been running for 15 years and is still going strong, with cumulative sales of the video games alone having reached in excess of 200 million copies as of 2010. One of the obvious questions that one might ask oneself is why Pokémon has been so successful. While there is surely a multitude of factors that contributed to Pokémon’s success, an interesting way to think about the franchise’s rise to fame is from a behavioral economic standpoint.
One of the things the article mentions is that the marketing campaign for Pokémon was brilliant. Not only did Nintendo have the television series, the movies, and the lines of toys and video games, they also had other means of advertising in the form of Pokémon airplanes, Pokémon bullet trains, posters in cities, etc… The article goes on to suggest that the goal of the Pokémon marketing campaign was twofold:
1. To get kids to ask their parents to buy them Pokémon merchandise.
2. To get parents to realize “this Pokémon is a big deal”, and then buy it for their children.
The games, toys, movies and television series served to promote goal #1 while the airplanes, trains, and posters served to promote goal #2.
As the article explains, “goal #2, when carried out, gives us Pokémon-addicted kids, who then start asking their parents to buy them more Pokémon games, or even video games in general”.
This is where it is interesting to consider this model as an information cascade. What is further interesting is that we can actually discern two distinct cascades that run parallel to each other.
The first cascade consists of the kids, who receive signals in the form of their friends buying the Pokémon merchandise. Since kids are especially easily influenced, one can see how easily it is for a cascade to start. It only takes for one or two of a kid’s friends to buy Pokémon merchandise for that kid to do the same thing, regardless of his personal information regarding Pokémon. I know that this was definitely the case for me when I was in middle school: I had noticed a few guys in my grade who always brought Pokémon cards to school so one day I asked my father to buy me a deck. I didn’t even know what Pokémon was or how the card game worked, but I ignored my lack of knowledge about it and demanded that I get some cards because they looked cool and all the other guys had some.
The second cascade consists of the parents, who receive signals both in the form of their kids’ friends’ parents’ buying them Pokémon merchandise (since if the friends own Pokémon merchandise, one can assume their parents bought it for them), and in the form of the massive Nintendo marketing campaign consisting of the aforementioned airplanes, trains, and posters. These signals easily push parents to go ahead and purchase the merchandise for their kids. Again using my experience as an example, when I asked my father for my first deck of cards, he had no idea what Pokémon was. However, the fact that so many kids at school were into it, combined with the multitude of “Gotta Catch ‘Em All!” posters that ran rampant on video game and toy store windows easily convinced him to buy me Pokémon stuff.
This interesting phenomenon of having two information cascades that depend on each other to succeed meant that if either one of them didn’t start, the other wouldn’t either, and thus the Pokémon franchise wouldn’t take off. On the other hand if one of them started, the other would start as well, giving the franchise twice the proliferating power of a single cascade. Thus, when looking at Pokémon from a behavioral economic standpoint, it is easy to see why the franchise was met with such incredible success, despite the fact that at its core, it isn’t necessarily all that special (considering there were many other franchises similar to it like Digimon that never took off as well).
http://kotaku.com/5331307/the-everything-disease-a-forensic-analysis-of-the-popularity-of-pokemon