Background
As part of the University of Washington’s Michael G. Foster School of Business Undergraduate degree program, all students must go through the Strategic Management capstone course and participate in the Strategy Development Case Competition. Each quarter the company and theme are different. My team was tasked with finding a unique way for The Pokemon Company International (TPCi) to capture and retain the attention of its young audience as they transition from their teenage years to adulthood. We recognized that many fans revisit the brand in adulthood and that TPCi strives to foster continuous engagement with teenagers and cultivate a lasting connection to the Pokémon brand by offering diverse experiences beyond games, including brand licensing partnerships, community-building initiatives, educational programs, and creative collaborations.
Result
In the end, we projected there to be a CSR Net Present Value added of $632 Million for the project. This solves Pokemon’s problem and allows them to connect directly with Gen Z and Gen Alpha through events that align with their brand and image. Our CSR driven approach and presentation brought us straight to the finals (top 20%) in a competition of 50 teams and over 240 competitors.
Objective
Our specific ask was broken down into these main points:
Since TPCi does not own the “game” or “app,” they are looking for ways to engage teenagers in other ways. Consider the resources that might be available to TPCi to develop, partner or create.
1. How should TPCi strategically position the various core offerings of Pokemon that it is responsible for managing in the U.S.? Which core offerings are most important to drive engagement? Is there a Blue Ocean strategy that should be pursued?
2. What teenage areas of interest / gen alpha (born between 2010 and 2025) values do you plan to address in your recommendation?
3. How should you message and market to the teenage audience to gain their interest?
4. What resources and capabilities are needed by TPCi to be successful with your recommendation? “Build, Borrow, or Buy?”
Solution
We spent many weeks determining our scope, pinpoints, and strategy and came up with a strong recommendation centered around in-person community service events that aligned with TPCi’s core values of community, intentional partnerships, and bringing the world together through Pokémon.
When looking at all the potential options to go with, my team and I created an alternative solutions matrix. This allowed us to weigh the different paths to take in our recommendation. We used this in our pitch for the recommendation to explain why our solution would be the best.
Through our recommendation, we create an implementation timeline looking both at a short-term and long-term affect. We wanted to express the scalability of our recommendation as it related to the growth of the project and Pokemon.
As any recommendation, risks and ways to mitigate them needed to be analyzed and considered. We created a risk matrix to visualize the impact and severity of the risks in additions to ways to mitigate them.
We created four KPIs that would be most effective in measuring the success of our campaign. This would also serve as goals that can scale with the project and ensure the project is in order.