For those not in the know, QR codes are the black and white squares you see plastered over marketing materials.
If you have a compatible smart phone, just locate an app for your mobile OS, open it, scan the code, wait a while and you’ll be taken to a website. Hang on… was that really worth it?
QR codes gets quite a lot of bad press, however negativity around the technology itself is definitely undeserved. The codes are simply modern-day barcodes, nothing more. The bad press should lie with the growing number of awful implementations of QR codes.
I wouldn’t stick a barcode on my marketing material to advertise a promotion or product, so why would I use a QR code? From a consumer point of view, I think the barrier to entry is still too high due to the fact that QR recognition isn’t native on the on many popular devices and by the time you open the app, the moment has gone.
A few years ago, QR codes were a marketeer’s dream. Phones had keyboards and people hated predictive text. Now we have smartphones designed for web browsing, is scanning a QR code any easier than typing a URL in or searching?