QR Codes: A Story Of Wasted Potential

An article by Buzz Internet Staff    No Comments

Quick Response or QR Codes have become a prominent fixture in our daily lives over the past decade yet many of our fellow citizens have no idea what they are. However, those “funny little boxes” as we’ve heard them described in the past could be a valuable resource for Toronto business marketing if we could only get the public to interact with them more often.

Unfortunately, as we’ve already pointed out, many consumers have no idea what a QR Code does and those who do tend not to interact with them anyway. The combination of these two factors is what has led to the severe waste of potential that QR Codes offer.

One of the biggest issues that have prevented QR Codes from reaching their full potential as a Toronto business marketing tool is the laziness of the average consumer who does not want to be bothered with opening an app to scan the code. This issue could quickly and easily be solved by Google and Apple by implementing a code reader directly into the camera software which comes standard on their smart phones, a feature which is already included in the much less popular Windows phones. A related issue is that despite this well-known short coming, many marketer and advertisers will instruct consumers to simply snap a picture of the code with their smart phone’s camera, leaving the consumer confused and frustrated when this action produces no results beyond saving a picture of the code to their phone.

The other side of the failure equation has been the content which is often linked to the codes. Consumers expect to be rewarded for taking the time to scan the code, yet most of the time all they end up being linked to is the corporation’s homepage or Facebook account. For the QR Code to become a successful Toronto business marketing technique, we need to fulfill the consumers desire to be rewarded for their efforts. If your organization is going to use these codes as part of your marketing strategy you should link them to a special offers page, VIP content that cannot be accessed otherwise or similar content.

If we all make a concerted effort to improve both our usage of QR codes and consumer education of what they are supposed to do when they come across one, we can end the wastage and help QR Codes finally achieve their full potential.