It’s a hard story to miss if you are in business. Nintendo Co. has added $12 billion to its value in a week as part owner of the company behind Pokemon Go, the find-the-character smartphone game that has been one of the biggest tech stories of the year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Nintendo Co. shares rose 13 percent to in Tokyo trading Tuesday following a 25 percent surge on Monday. That sent its market capitalization beyond $30 billion.

We checked in with a local expert on the development.

“Nintendo has a long history of profoundly understanding the link between technology and society and what makes people tick,” said Matthew Mitchell, associate professor of international business and strategy at Drake University and a longtime analyst of the gaming industry. “My gut feeling is that Nintendo was undervalued to begin with, in part because of abysmal failure of Wii U,” a console that badly missed sales projections despite the company’s other successes.

“This took it through the stratosphere,” Mitchell said. “It’s a marriage of technology and a loyal fan base.”

 

In less than a week, Pokemon Go amassed more daily users than Twitter in the United States. “That is absolutely unheard of,” Mitchell said.

Pokemon Go involves finding well-known Pokemon characters within scenes on your smartphone. The app is free, but you can buy things like incense to help lure the characters.

There is talk of a huge upside involving businesses using the technology to lure customers.

“To be very honest, the first Pokemon I found was a crab at a seafood restaurant,” Mitchell said. “That is absolutely brilliant. Business placements could be very real in the future.”

Surely there are lessons for the rest of us here. How did this happen? What did Nintendo do right? 

Mitchell said Nintendo and the Pokemon Go creator, Google spinoff Niantic Inc., have married a reasonably basic technology with Nintendo’s hugely popular Pokemon franchise and all its related upside on the sale of cards, stuffed animals and other merchandise.

“I can’t overestimate the elegance, the power, the intuition and the foresight that Nintendo has displayed by transforming technology over the generations,” Mitchell said. “You’ve taken a technology that is OK and paired it with characters that have deep meaning to many people.”

And there is one of the main lessons, in Mitchell’s view.

“Don’t get caught up in the bells and whistles off high tech when you can have infinitely more impact and drive more adoption by coming up with something that is in tune with the souls of people,” Mitchell said. “Tap into the core psychology element that drives humans.”

“Some people have said it’s ironic that Michelle Obama worked seven years to get people to walk,” Mitchell said, “and Pokemon has done more in a week than she has done in that time.”