Polaroid turned Pikachu, Sylveon and the Poke Ball into instant cameras because slapping Pokemon on things remains an excellent business model.
I haven’t played Pokemon since I was a kid. I remember it being fun, playing on the floor at my local video game store. I remember all of the original 151 Pokemon — blade-armed mantis Scyther was my favorite. I played Pokemon Snap on my N64. That is about where my current knowledge ends.
I don’t know how many Pokemon exist now. But I do know Pikachu. More importantly, Polaroid knows I know Pikachu — and that you know Pikachu.
Capitalizing on that knowledge, the company on Tuesday announced a limited-edition Pokemon camera collection to celebrate the franchise’s 30th anniversary.
The main attraction is a bright yellow Pikachu version of the compact Polaroid Go Generation 3 instant camera. It costs $100 and includes a hand strap shaped like Pikachu’s lightning-bolt tail.
A pink, white and blue Sylveon camera is also available for the same price. I couldn’t tell you what a Sylveon was, so I looked it up. It debuted in Pokemon X and Y in 2013, meaning this collection is apparently designed to exploit several generations of childhood memories at once.
The final camera is a larger $140 Polaroid Now Generation 3, designed to look like a Poke Ball. All three cameras have Poke Ball-shaped shutter buttons, just in case the bright colors and familiar characters weren’t already doing enough.
None of this is new camera technology. These are existing Polaroid cameras wearing Pokemon costumes. And honestly, that’s probably all it takes.
Plenty of adults are still into Pokemon because they play the games, collect the cards and genuinely enjoy the community around it. But companies know there’s another audience too: people like me, who moved on years ago but can still be pulled back by wrapping a product in a memory from when we were too young to have bills.
A 2014 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research examined whether nostalgia makes people more willing to part with their money. Across six experiments, researchers found that people who felt nostalgic were willing to pay more for products and valued money less than people in a neutral emotional state.
The researchers concluded that nostalgia may often appear in marketing because it encourages consumers to spend.
In other words, thinking about your childhood can make you financially stupid.
That doesn’t mean Polaroid assembled a team of psychologists in a dark room and ordered them to weaponize Pikachu. Pokemon is celebrating a major anniversary, and branded merchandise is inevitable. But this collection does feel like a particularly clean demonstration of how nostalgia marketing works.
The target isn’t necessarily someone currently obsessed with Pokemon. It can also be someone like me, an adult who hasn’t played in years but still immediately recognizes that yellow face and remembers when Pokemon was a game instead of a multibillion-dollar machine designed to appear on every object I own.
Kids will probably want these cameras too. But kids generally don’t have $100. Adults do, and adults are increasingly spending that money on toys, collectibles and other products connected to the things they loved growing up.
