QR codes are for life, not just for show
Posted July 8, 2011 at 4:24 pmFiled under: Mobile Advertising, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Web, QR codes by Anne Thomas Follow @Miss_mobile_webThe ubiquity of QR codes as a marketing tool for instant connectivity between customers and brands should mean that this form of marketing has hit critical mass, but customer experience still falls short of what should be achieved.
When QR codes are created, they are for life, not just for show. They are not dynamic, they cannot change, they are static so they have to be scalable on inception and created with the long tail in mind. Also, brands should think carefully before running QR code campaigns that take their consumer via a third party URL and not their own domain, otherwise they are tied into the supplier for a very long time to come.
As way of example, I recently went into a toy shop with my daughter and while she was diverted by the latest piece of well designed plastic, my eye was drawn to one particular product because of the overt use of QR code placement on its packaging. However, my intrigue soon turned to disappointment after scanning it because the landing page I was taken to (via a third party URL and not the Brand’s own domain) was completely broken and I was returned an error message. Even though the brand had no control over that URL, this woeful experience still reflects very badly on them – and for a long time to come.
Some brands appear to be doing it right though and consumers are happy to interact when it is done properly. Kelloggs, for example, recently used a QR Code on cereal boxes as part of its Crunchy Nut cereal promotion and the campaign drove more than 40,000 QR scans, easily outstripping the parallel text campaign that produced only 6,000 texts.
There is a huge market out there which just needs to be addressed intelligently and with the future in mind.
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To your points:
1. A best practice is to establish a sub-domain (client side) with a redirect to wherever you want the QR to resolve. This means you can always change your redirect and you are not “locked” in for life to a single URL. Even if your QR vendor goes out of business, you can manage the redirect from your own hosting.
2. The Crunchy Nut campaign is interesting because they never disclose how many packages were sold, which means we don’t know what 40,000 really means. Also, it was the launch of a new cereal brand in the States, where the average annual promotional budget for a cereal is around US$10,000,000. If this were such a raving success why aren’t QR campaigns used on all Kellogg’s products?