The Allure of Hidden Messages

People have always been looking for hidden messages around them. Music lovers in the 60s, 70s, and 80s have always been rewounding music cassette tapes and playing them backwards in the hope that they would hear a demonic message or some kid of prophetic revelation, or just some silly adage.

Backmasking has been around for years and enthusiasts would spend countless amount of time listening to these tapes played in reverse. It is not just the death metal bands though. Over the years, different artists and bands have come up with backmasked messages in their songs. Artists including Missy Elliot, Franz Ferdinand, Green Day, Judas Priest, and Weird Al Yankovic. While the messages now range from:

* sinister (“Happiness is a warm gun”),
* somewhat innocent (The recipe for Big Mac or the full chorus of the song)
* cute and humorous (“Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands”), and lastly,
* positive messages (“Do your homework”).

For a list of backmasked messages in songs, you can look up the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backmasked_messages.

In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in messages hidden in plain view. Maybe because of the huge success of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, movies like the National Treasure and things like the Bible Code, people have been more interested in and keener about symbolism and messages in everyday things like the dollar bill and even artwork.

In marketing, lots have been said about subliminal messages. People have been looking for naked men in Camel packs, sexual images and messages or maybe just the word “sex” in Coke cans, Disney films, even Skittles candy. All these while businesses have been using white or black space to hide symbols and messages in their logos. Have you seen the forward arrow in the FedEx logo, or the arrow in Amazon that points you from “A to Z”, the N & W and the compass pointer in the Northwest Airlines logo, or perhaps the bear that is hidden in the mountain as part of the Toblerone logo?

QR codes are the perfect vehicle for hidden or secret messages.

You could follow ThinkGeek’s example, by putting a code on a T-shirt without saying anything about where it leads to.

Or you could organize a scavenger hunt using QR codes to give the contestants the clues and hints of where the next clues or sites would be.

Or go all the way and HIDE the actual code itself like what Apple did with the iPhone 3G.

What you get is a hip image. People would see you as an up-to-date company who is willing to interact with customers and make it simple for them to connect with you. You get great buzz, your QR codes and the ingenious way you’ve used them would be talked about in both technology and marketing spheres online. What’s more, you have the best way to pique your target market’s curiosity by luring them with the exclusivity of secret messages.