Augmented Reality Comes to Retail

- Kamil Klamann and Sekoul Krastev

In the summer of 2016, pedestrians on New York’s Fifth Avenue encountered crowds of (mostly young) people, hastily running into Central Park, smartphones in hand, shouting out Pokémon character names and cross-street locations. Within weeks of its release on July 6,2016, the Pokémon Go app attracted 40 million daily active users and created a level of in-app engagement that Facebook could only envy.

The Pokémon Go fad has faded, but it holds important lessons for companies intent on reaching and engaging consumers where they are, especially retailers: The game, the first truly social augmented reality (AR) experience, enthralled a new breed of omni connected consumers as nothing else had done previously. The people who embraced the augmented reality of Pokémon Go inhabit a world where the line between real and digital is so blurred that they essentially became one and the same — constantly augmented and improved by invisible technologies. And they are hungry for better, more personalized experiences.