Around the Net
QR Codes Hardly A Hit With Consumers
- Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Tuesday, July 3, 2012 9:04 AM
Despite spirited support from Madison Ave., consumers just aren’t that into QR codes. In fact, according to Forrester Research, only 5% of Americans scanned the brand gateways between May and
July of last year. What explains consumers’ tepid response? “Advertisers are looking at every way possible that they can connect with consumers,” Forrest analyst Patti Freeman Evans
tells Bloomberg Businessweek. “Consumers [on the other hand] aren’t saying, ‘Oh, I really want to be able to connect with companies and brands.” As such, advertisers’
“initial enthusiasm has tempered,” says Chia Chen, an SVP at Digitas.
We've had success using QR Codes. We market and sell different items, but recently included QR Codes into the design of custom labels for water bottles. We use some form of "call to action" under the code such as scan for a coupon or scan to join us on FB. We work with Talking H2O ( www.talkingh2o.com ) and they are the ones who suggested trying it. The conversion rate is still less than 50% but we are the average of 5% you quoted above.
At a conference last week, an attendee forgot business cards and asked me to scan a QR code on his wristband... When I went to open an app to let me do it, I needed to register. No thanks.
To me, a marketer's money is better spent on a mobile-friendly site that I can just access anywhere. Or else, give me a platform that let's me take a picture and automatically recognizes it's a QR and stores the data. Short of that, the only codes I'm scanning are food items to track in my fitness app. (To me, that's time well-spent. Something to consider...)