Digital Marketing

Qrcodes, Consumers and Brands

What are QR codes?

Quick Response Code or more popularly known as QRCodes are 2d Images that have the ability to get scanned using a mobile smartphone’s scan reader applications like scanlife, qrcode reader etc It is said to have been invented as early as 1994 by Denso Wave to track vehicles during the manufacturing process.

Why is it useful:

• It can store lot of information
• It saves a lot of time for online users who want to visit the website link but don’t want to go through the tedious process of typing the whole url.

How does it work:

QRCodes allows users to point their mobile phones at the QrCode image and voila! The user is redirected to the site url online.

Where does it stand today?

It created a lot of hype especially in the last few years since the launch of mobile smartphones. It’s very frequently seen in advertisements and marketing campaigns off-late across Brands, Industries and Countries due to its ease of use.

The advent of smart phones combined with their falling price helped QR codes to carve a niche for themselves among the various other marketing methods. With the best social media tracking tools and QRCodes ability to be tracked, monitored easily also gives lot of insights to marketing researchers about the demographic of users globally accessing it.

QR codes are easy to generate and with its growing popularity, there are plenty of sites where you can even create funky or elegant codes to match your personality or brand image.

For the end user, consuming this content is easy as well as engaging by scanning the code with their smart phones. Brands have also warmed up and are tapping into the potential of QR codes a lot these days.

Now with every new tool, there always is a negative side too. For eg. there have been reports of QR codes downloading malicious apps onto your phone. These apps have the potential to access your personal data & forward it to other shady sources. Since there is no way for you to determine what link the QR code contains, this is a huge blind side. Also you might not notice what has happened until quite later, which might sometimes be too late for you to do anything.

Also the idea of scanning a code has been improvised with the advent of newer concepts like Google goggles. This app lets you take a photo of your surroundings or any object and gets you the relevant information required. Since you know what you are searching for, the danger of downloading any malware is highly reduced.

So what are your views about using QRCodes and which QRCode experience has been the most memorable for you till date?

In my opinion, the QR code is not yet done. Google goggles builds on what QR codes introduced. As long as you are not scanning any random or fishy codes and can verify that the code seems legit, there is no harm in using QR codes.

Few links:

• App store itunes
• Scan Life Android
• Scan Life Blackberry

Although Google goggles is much simpler, it does not mean that it does not have any security flaws. Each piece of software comes with its pros and cons. It is ultimately you, the end user who can make or break a product.

So, will you still use QR codes? Or shift base to Google goggles? Share your views with us here.

Ciao

Ravi

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