QR Codes and Mobile Marketing

QR Codes or Quick Response codes is quickly becoming a great tools for companies who are trying to reach out to the mobile audience.   QR Codes are 2 dimensional images that contain rich information for consumers in the form of images, text, urls, SMS and geo locations to name a few.   You may have already probably seen a QR Code and not realized, what it was and that it contains rich information for you to see.  You can view my QR Code below:  This technology has been around for many  years now and was first introduced by a subsidiary of Toyota motors, Toyota's  original concept of QR codes was to allow individuals to track packages and has evolve to allowing for a much broader application usages.

A quick response codes can be read by a QR Reader and some application exist for your mobile device today like your Iphone, and Adroid.  You can quickly search and find lots of great applications to be able to read these codes which are quickly appearing on just almost all print marketing.  A QR Reader simply snaps a picture of the 2-dimentional image and shows you the particular information that was encoded in the code, weather it's an image, or simple text.

How can marketers take advantage of this great technology and engage users and get the most out of them?  A company in Brazil, (Editoras Online), which you can consider the equivalent of Amazon took this concept of usability and made it into a big marketing campaing and pushed the information out to the users and made what they called a "Living Book" or a book which content would change as users snaps pictures of these QR Codes which were spread through out the city.  You can view their approach on the video of how this company was able to generate offline interest in their website in order to increase traffic and interest in this book.  Dick's sporting good kicked off their mobile website by making a big announcement on the big jumbo screen at Cowboy Stadium.  What's great about both of these marketing effort is the interactivity from your mobile users and consumers, in which Marketing companies can give consumers more information and at the same time measure their success or failure rate of the particular campaign.

If you want to think outside the box, remember what these companies have done to use a technology who's primary application was designed for package tracking to a full engaging advertising campaign.  The use of this technology gave instant feedback to both companies about how effective their marketing efforts were and proved to a be a successful concept for their marketing efforts, with regards to mobile users.  You can learn more about the use of QR codes and Marketing here if you like.