The subject of QR codes or "Quick Response" codes is a popular one at the moment, and barely a day goes by without colleagues and friends asking me whether I think they'll take off.
So far, I've been pretty bearish on them. Sometimes my thoughts can be summed up with the popular internet word "meh", but often I find myself reasoning why they're probably just a bit of a marketing gimmick.
I did wonder whether my negative position was biased by me being an iPhone owner. iPhones are non-the-wiser about QR codes unless you download one of a number of apps. Those raving about QR tend to be Android users, with phones that often (but not always) have QR reading built-in. So I thought I'd look into the technology and its uses in a bit more detail.
Taking such a strong negative position on QR codes could be foolish of me - if there's one thing I've learned, the trick to being an all-seeing-oracle and predicting the digital future is to make positive rather than negative predictions. If you say something will never take off, it's easy to be proved wrong. If you say something will happen, whether that's QR codes going mainstream, Yahoo beating Google, or even the coming of The Apocalypse, you can always argue to any naysayers that it's still just around the corner. But at least my position is based on some evidence…
Origin of QR
First, a bit of history. QR codes were actually invented by a subsidiary of Toyota. They needed a solution in their factories for tracking parts as part of the 'lean' manufacturing process.
This subsidiary, Denso Wav, still own the patent and the trademark, although they do not exercise them. They recognised that, for the technology to take off, it must become a de facto standard, and thus should be free to use. Of course, this didn't stop Microsoft and dozens of others inventing and pushing their own standard, but QR seems to have gained dominance.
These QR codes, basically two-dimensional barcodes, were printed on cards known as 'kanban'. These cards allowed just-in-time production by signalling the station further up the production line to start making more of whatever it was your station was about to run out of. The clever bit was that they could be scanned much quicker than traditional barcodes, with lower chance of errors, and could hold more data. Depending on the error correction level required, they can store as much as 7,089 alphanumeric characters, compared to the traditional and ubiquitous 'UPC' barcode's 12 digits.
For these kind of purposes, QR codes are brilliant. They can store a lot more data than a standard barcode, are easily printed, fast to scan as I said, and cheap - unlike RFID or 'near field' technology. They've taken off in a big way in the ticketing industry such as cinemas, allowing fairly secure digital tickets, and forms of 2D bar-codes are even used on airport boarding cards. The key thing here is that the consumers are printing or showing QR codes and having them scanned by business - not the other way around. They're still just barcodes.
And yet now, people - marketeers - have latched onto the idea of businesses printing the codes, and consumers scanning them. I even know of one publisher whose CEO has issued an edict that all magazines must be using QR codes, forthwith.
Using QR – the basics
QR codes could have half a chance of taking off if most businesses using them didn't screw up some of the basics.
Firstly, there are the instructions, if there are any at all. "Scan this with your smartphone", the captions say. I'm pretty sure my iPhone 4 counts as a smartphone, but if I open the camera and point it at one, nothing is going to happen… I have to download an app that scans QR codes.
But how do I know that I need to download an app? Even if I did know, I'd have to know that they're called a QR code to be able to search the App Store for a solution.
Secondly, there are the placements. Half the codes I see are on posters on the underground, where mobile access is non-existent. Some states in the US have banned QR codes from billboards due to drivers trying to scan codes in as they pass. Why you'd put a QR code by the side of the highway, when it takes a good 30 seconds to get your phone ready to scan, is anyone's guess, but people are…
When all the code does is open a URL (or when you're underground, throw an error that you need to be online), it's not that useful. Yes, your marketing team can track it - but you can do that with custom short URL services such as bit.ly.
Many pro-QR people point to their popularity in Asia as an indicator that they'll be the next big thing here. What they forget is that reading, remembering and then typing a URL when you live in Asia is a daunting task. All the URLs (until recently) are all in Latin characters. If we in the UK were only allowed web addresses in Kanji, we'd be turning to QR codes pretty quick too. Japan is of course the largest consumer of QR codes, although take-up in the UK is a surprisingly high 7th in the world.
There are also a few security concerns to be aware of. Many QR-code readers open a detected URL automatically. Given it is impossible to read the contents of a QR-code by human eye, there's no way of seeing whether the URL you've unwittingly opened is what you expected.
What would happen if hackers started printing their own codes with malicious URLs onto stickers and stuck them over legitimate codes on outdoor advertising? At best you could be 'rick-rolled' and at worst, have data stolen from your mobile device.
Poor results
Finally, the most damning evidence I've seen so far against QR codes comes from the early results of a split-test campaign run by our subscriptions team on Web User magazine.
In one version, the advert contains a URL and a phone number. In the second, in addition to these is a QR code. The response rate to the advert with the QR code is lower than the advert without, despite them both having the phone and URL route. Does the QR code confuse people and put them off? Does it take up valuable space? It's too early to tell with this campaign at time of writing, but it's certainly an interesting result.
If you really must use QR codes, avoid the usual mistakes. Make sure you still print the URL. Make sure the URL in the QR code is the right one - you'll need to test it with a phone - especially if you have multiple offer codes in the same publication or change them issue by issue.
Some publishers are concerned about QR code use by advertisers in their magazines. Their ability to be tracked could of course provide advertisers with much wanted data about the effectiveness of their adverts, but the fear is that advertisers may see the poor response rates as a failure of the magazine rather than of QR code technology. It also puts the emphasis on direct response when advertising also has a branding element, something online advertising and its very metrics-driven nature has suffered from.
The best way to make use of QR codes is to use their strengths to make it worthwhile scanning for both consumers and your business. Don't just print a URL that could more easily be typed. It could be possible (although probably expensive) to print unique URLs on every single copy for ever single promotional URL. Imagine being able to track the response rate of individual subscribers, or of each distribution channel on the newsstand.
I hope that more and more point-of-sale systems will start to support QR as well as UPC barcodes, but this will take time and it will need to be driven by a need. If every retailer in the country could scan them with their existing EPOS, the opportunities in vouchering would be fantastic. Unfortunately getting this kind of adoption could take many years.
Google and Nokia are more bullish on Near Field Communication (NFC), with the former having recently dropped support for QR codes on Google Places. Since they both make mobile phones with NFC chips in them, that kind of makes sense. NFC is an interesting technology, but another topic in its own right. With credit card companies also picking up on it, it will be present in some form in more and more retailers.
For now, the QR code hype will probably continue for a while, then hopefully it shall fizzle out when used by consumers, but grow when used by technologies such as ticketing, warehousing, and such like.
