Category: General

Creative QR Code Campaigns

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I’m sure those of you reading this already know what a QR code is. Let us share with you some creative ways of using QR codes for your marketing campaigns.

QR codes don’t have to look boring like this:

Creative designs and colours can be used and the QR code will still work! Check out some cool designs below:

Familiar? You might have actually seen some of these around! Companies such as Coca Cola, Calvin Klein, Clinique, Ralph Lauren and many others already use QR codes in their marketing campaigns.

Here are more designs to inspire you:

For more, check out this link: http://mashable.com/2011/07/23/creative-qr-codes/#208896-Corkbin

After looking at all these awesome designs, you must be wondering what you can use a QR code for.
There are many uses to it, other than just linking it to a website. It all depends on your creativity and how you want to use it! Now, I’m going share with you 6 creative uses of QR code for marketing.

1. TESCO had an innovative campaign which turned the subway into a virtual store, where users can make purchases by scanning the QR code for each product, which will then be delivered to their home.

2. Victoria’s Secret’s QR code campaign. No description necessary.

3. Voting via QR code: Encourage customers to scan a QR code that leads to a website whereby they can vote for just anything.
Eg. Starbucks has printed QR codes on their coupon handouts and each time a customer scans the QR code, it will lead them to a voting page where they can vote for their favourite brew.

4. QR codes don’t have to be tiny! Have you seen giant QR code billboards? Eg. Daring Calvin Klein had their ‘Get it Uncensored’ version of racy ad in a form of QR code, hung up high in a billboard at Houston and Lafayette Street and many other venues in New York City, attracting thousands of curious passers-by to scan.

5. A walking QR code might be just as cool! Want more people to notice you during a conference event? Ran out of contact cards for clients? Why not ask them to snap a QR code that you are wearing and get all your personal information stored in their phone immediately?
Eg. Gushcloud Singapore, http://gushcloud.com/ puts a QR code on the back of the T-shirts they hand out at events, making every person wearing it a URL link!

6. Always having a long queue right outside your restaurants and not having enough menus to show all your customers? Place a QR code right in front of your restaurant for anybody to scan their own menu so that they can view privately while queuing. Save money on printing!

Come up with your own creative ways of using QR codes. Go to http://qropit.com/ and start building your own QR code campaign!

Why another QR code service?

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First of all, welcome to QropIt!

Okay why does the world need Yet Another QR Code Service?

We believe traditional QR codes are broken. Maybe broken is too strong a word, but it is flawed. A bit of history – QR code was invented by Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave in 1994. This was before the proliferation of internet-enabled phones and devices. Because of that, QR codes were designed to have the data stored statically in the code itself. You scan the code, you see the text data. Surprisingly, there aren’t actual ISO standards for different QR code types like contact info, web URL, etc. There are only “de facto” standards and RFCs which are proposed standards (you can see some examples here and here).

So, what’s wrong with hardcoding the data directly into the QR code? The problem is the data cannot be changed once the QR code has been created. If you printed a business card with a QR code in it, and later your mobile number changed, you would need to reprint all the cards. If you create an advertising campaign with a QR code that goes to http://www.mycompany.com/AwesomeCampaign2011, what do you do when the campaign is over? Sure, you can create a URL redirect on the server and keep that, but who wants to have a bunch of old redirects on their website? A better solution is to change where the QR code points to.

So our solution is to not store the actual data in the QR code, but rather a link to the actual data. This opens the door to a bunch of really cool features:

  • Our QR codes can be activated and deactivated at any time. Heck, if we wanted to we can create a QR code that goes to a website in the day, but plays a YouTube video at night. Not sure why we would want to do that, but it can be done.
  • Our QR codes can be edited and modified at any time.
  • We can return different results based on the users’ location, phone model or other criteria.
  • We can provide detailed scanning analytics. Put our QR code on your business card, and you can see how many people scanned it and from where.

Best of all, our QR codes are backwards compatible with all QR code scanners.

So what’s the downside? Well, our QR codes require an internet connection to decode. But considering that the vast majority of QR codes scanned are URLs which require an internet connection anyway, we don’t see this as much of an issue.

We have some other tricks up our sleeves which we will reveal in future blog entries.

And oh yeah, we call our enhanced QR codes qrops.