Photo: Dashboard.ca

Over the pass few months, Quick Response (QR) codes have been popping up in retail stores, magazines and on various online platforms because of its virtually non existent cost as well as ease of implementation. However, It’s been a while since we heard something exciting about QR codes. QR codes have not seen the universal popularity that mobile technophiles originally hoped for. And it makes you wonder, are they still around?

What exactly are QR codes?

QR codes are those square mobile barcodes that you see which allows you to scan with a QR code reader to see what happens next. QR codes were invented by Toyota to track vehicles during the manufacturing process, and has slowly be adopted in various other industry mainly as a form of marketing tool. The main impetus for the popularity of these codes came from the smartphone market, as this market expanded so did the codes. Added to this is the exponential growth of social media – for instance a QR code embedded in your phone can give out contact information such as photos, videos, favorite things and links to social media pages like Facebook and Twitter.

The adoption of QR codes

According to a survey of 794 online respondents by Simpson Carpenter, just 36 percent of consumers (a little more than one third) know what QR codes are for, while 11 precent have actually used them. Amongst the 11 percent of respondents that had actually used a QR code, just under half (47 percent) said they found them very useful and would like to see them more widely available, a third found them useful on certain occasions and don’t mind using them.However, a 20percent of respondents replied that QR codes don’t really offer any advantages and won’t expect to use them in future. There are also instances where people do know that they can scan them, but they don’t necessarily understand why they’re scanning them for. What contributed to this is a lack of creativity amongst the marketing campaign of QR codes. If you have ever scanned a QR code, you would know that the vast majority of those u scanned will land you on a webpage that was the same URL as in the ad itself. That is about as useful as telling someone your name while wearing a name tag.

QR codes vs NFC

At the same time when QR codes grew in popularity (and then lost it), Near Field Communication (NFC) technology was also gaining some popularity. Many found that NFC was a better option because instead of having to download a QR code reader, scan the code and wait for something to happen, NFC allows you to just hold your phone up near a sign with an NFC chip and get exactly the same results. The user experience of NFC requires fewer steps. Even Google is ditching QR codes in support of the more promising NFC.  NFC also has the advantage of being secure. This will allow users to complete mobile payments, be securely identified and to conduct other confidential and/or private transactions.

Death of QR Code

So the question is, are we at the end of the QR code era? Will we no longer see QR codes along the streets? While QR codes are cheap, fast (anyone can create one within seconds), easy to implement, in place (everyone with a smartphone can get a reader-app) and not to forget visible, the current uses of QR codes in Singapore are still limited in its creativity. In this information age, where things are moving fast, new technology will replace the old one if there are no excitement about it. What we are missing is a killer marketing campaign that will entice people to use their phones to scan. If this continue to happen, the days for QR codes adopted in marketing are numbered.

Further, until Apple includes a native QR code application and automatically integrates it with their camera application, QR codes will remain a curious oddity for the technically proficient geeks and bleeding adopters.

What should marketers stop doing

For marketers, please do not use them to just send people to your homepage URL. Most of us can read, and type faster. The popularity of QR codes is going to be severely diminished by the user’s annoyance and provide another reason for us to stop using QR codes. Please do not abuse the technology and embed a QR code in the middle of an article that directs me to the same article online. I see QR codes as a fast, easy way to connect the physical and digital worlds. When employed intelligently, QR codes lead to useful information and provide a way to opt into updates or further interaction with a topic/product/service. They should always enhance interactions, never detract from or complicate them.