QR Codes: What Your Customers Might Be Saying

We stumbled upon a video on how a small business in St. Joseph, Michigan, has stirred the whole town with its new billboard advertisement.

The large billboard with a QR code and the question Why? appeared over the store. It was very visible that the whole town immediately took noticed and asked, what it was all about.

A local TV station picked up the news and started interviewing residents who confessed that they have absolutely no idea what the large sign was saying and what the “symbol” was.

Is this what your customers are saying about your QR code campaign? Local businesses might be quick to jump on the QR code bandwagon, but without proper planning, it might be a big fail.

In this instance, the retailer who put up the QR code just would not get any scans. His or her customers see the QR code he had put up, but nobody knows what it is. This means that nobody would know what to do with it either.

The retailer might have put up a snazzy video behind the QR code, or built an amazing mobile site for it, but without clear instructions, nobody would scan it.

The unfortunate thing is that clear instructions is fairly easy to include in a QR code campaign. It would take just a few lines of text to tell people what the “symbol” is, what they could get from it, and how to use a smartphone with a camera and a QR code scanner app to decode it. You could also throw in instructions on how to get the app for your phone!

Thankfully, the local TV station saw it and ran a story on it. From being a near fail, the QR code billboard succeeded in creating word of mouth, got the retailer on the local TV news, and generated enough buzz. People would soon know what the QR code is and how they could read it!