These days it can be hard to pass a poster or pick up a jar without finding a QR code promising exciting extras and exclusives staring you in the face. But are those ubiquitous monochrome squares more loved by marketers than anyone else?
Recently, bieMEDIA, an online marketing and media company, predicted the end of the QR code based on the fact that very few consumers actually use them.
We’ve blogged before about the good, the bad and the pointless ways brands are using QR.
But as they move into maturity what are the main arguments for and against these matrix barcodes, and just how valuable are they in driving word of mouth?
For
QR codes are so popular on posters, flyers and other marketing material because companies can use them to convey specific information about their brands to a target audience. Because the majority of people who use and recognise QR codes fall into the 18-34 age bracket, it means campaigns can be specifically developed for this demographic.
Their versatility also means they can be tailored to all sorts of needs as long as the creativity is there. Just look at this case study from India:
It looks pretty impressive from a community engagement and WOM perspective. But despite the initial positive response, how lasting do those conversations prove to be?
Against
As a QR-virgin myself (someone who has never actually scanned a QR code despite being surrounded by them every day), I am sceptical as to how these codes can be incorporated into a meaningful and lasting campaign. And the data is on my side.
According to an October 2011 survey from strategic marketing firm Russell Herder, although 72% of consumers say they have seen a QR code, nearly 30% of them don’t really know what they are.
More worryingly, 57% of consumers who have scanned a QR code say they did nothing with the information. This means that brands and marketing companies are spending time, effort and money on campaigns that don’t really seem to have an effect on consumers.
Couple this with the fact that other technologies such as NFC and mobile visual search are now on the rise, the trend seems to be towards QR codes becoming nothing more than distant relics of a past era: the marketing equivalent of the MiniDisc.
As with all tools, QR codes are only as good as the strategy or creative execution behind how they are used – and not very many brands are doing that well.
There are shinier alternatives creeping up too. NFC provides the potential for commercial services as well as marketing opportunities. Aurasma, an augmented reality app, acts as a much more tangible ‘bridge’ between the real and virtual worlds we inhabit, providing users with an interactive way of enhancing everyday life, such as this example of a polar bear on the River Thames:
So what do you think? What are your best and worst case studies of QR codes being used by brands? And how often do you use them yourself?
Another first for the blog to see us into the bank holiday weekend – this time we welcome Julian Schollmeyer, our Client Services Manager based out of Berlin, with the salutary story of a German social campaign… ^MF
It started out as just another social media crowdsourcing campaign along the lines of Walkers’ ‘Do Us A Flavour‘ and Mountain Dew’s DEWmocracy.
“Pril”, the well-known brand of washing-up liquid from German FMCG company Henkel, was due for a makeover. Henkel launched a campaign on the net where users could design their own ‘individual’ bottle using a tool set with mostly predefined graphics (i.e. colourful flowers, birds etc) to stamp on the virtual label. The two designs with the most votes would then hit the shelves in October. So far, so predictable.
However, having users stamp pre-defined flowers on a label and then hailing it as a crowdsourcing campaign struck copywriter Peter Breuer as, frankly, lame. So he chose the pen from the tool menu as his weapon of choice and produced a more, well, unique design – then asked his followers on Twitter to vote for it:
His idea? Chicken flavoured Pril!
His design quickly went up to number one and blogs as well as news magazines were quick to cover the story, resulting in even more votes.
Looking at this, I’d say Henkel had it coming, but maybe they had a premonition that something like this might happen, as they built in insurance: the fact that an internal jury would choose two designs from the top ten. Surely there’d be two designs in there containing only those lovely flowers and birds!? Well, there are, but Peter’s Chicken flavoured Pril inspired a lot of people to upload their weirdest ideas and see if they can steal one of the top positions; at the time of writing this is the leader.
As the story unfolded, blogs and online magazines discussed the bigger issue here: what does a crowdsourcing campaign need to look like if it wants to be taken seriously, and how could the Pril campaign have been better designed?
In the meantime, Peter Breuer stated on Facebook that he in no way intended to protest against Henkel or its brand Pril and that he never imagined that his doodle of a chicken would cause such broad repercussions. However, he was pleased to see that bloggers and media alike posed the question whether a campaign like this can actually be classified as being an effective marketing tool. He adds that he would like to see social media being used more for benevolent and socially beneficial purposes instead.
I’m confident that the next German crowdsourcing campaigns will look very different, and that this will mainly be thanks to the learnings from the Pril campaign.
Trust creates influence. Trust determines who we listen to. Trust is precious social currency, so brands are, quite rightly, crazy for it.
And Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer – an annual survey that gauges attitudes about the state of trust in business, government, NGOs and media across 23 countries – presents a pretty strong call to action to them all.
The good news is, globally our trust in institutions has increased, and that trust is helping to protect the reputations of the companies that cultivate it. The interesting news is, we’re increasingly questioning our peers’ opinion about companies, and starting to value experts, industry specialists and employees.
Well, interesting to me. For a while, I’ve had a pet gripe about brands who try to be our friends, thinking that social success requires them to become sycophantic chameleons pandering to our every whim.
I’d much rather brands be brilliant brands. Yes, I unequivocally expect them to listen and engage and react and inspire - but I also want to them to be strong, opinionated and aspirational, too.
Which is why I’m pleased with the Edelman findings. Of course, brands’ confidence should come from a knowledge that they are constantly listening, adapting and collaborating with their customers – but we do want to feel that the people we buy stuff from are better at it than we are – be that designing phones, baking cakes or creating our laws.
Tim Malbon of Made by Many recently posted a nice piece on how the rage for customisation and participation is wearing rather thin. This is not because the principle is at fault, but because the space is glutted with attempts to replace truly valuable engagement with one-size-fits-all gimmicks. No wonder we are looking for some authoritative and authentic brand output that doesn’t require us to design our own breakfast cereal.
For example, I found Gap’s quick back-down (and consequent crowdsourcing solution) in the face of social uproar about their rebranding a bit sad. Didn’t they feel strongly about the design? Hadn’t they paid Laird & Partners loads of money for a reason? Couldn’t they have generated something a bit more gutsy and productive – a Team Aniston / Team Jolie-style social rumble for fans of the old vs new logo, say – rather than quivering before the consumer and running away?
Richard Edelman’s assertion that “the right approach is for CEOs to be private sector diplomats” may be a little rigid. As part of my work heading up 1000heads’ social business consultancy, helping our clients to become conversational inside out from their processes and sharing tools to their culture and skills, I find that the best company spokespeople are often not the top management but the folk on the ground, who are truly passionate about what they do and embedded in it every day.
However, the principle is a good one. People will trust you if you are listening and engaging. But they also need you to have vocal belief in who you are, what you do, and why.
Crowdsourcing is one of those concepts which inspires intense emotions, from idealism-fuelled evangelism through to sneering cynicism. Often trumpeted as one of the triumphs of World 2.0, a utopia of democratic crowd wisdom that foregrounds the creativity of the little guy, it has captured the imagination of brands and organisations big time, from the sublime to the banal.
However, an equally vocal faction consider crowdsourcing to be an ineffective and unrigorous way of innovating, which has become a cheap and easy shortcut for lazy brands.
As John Klossner recently put it (in a post claiming that Mr Smith Goes to Washington is the first example of crowdsourcing on film – nice – I always think of Spartacus):
Crowdsourcing can be considered a way of doing a project cheaply. Instead of bringing in experts to look at the problem, you let “the crowd” solve it. For someone with professional expertise who makes a living at this, where is the attraction? Crowdsourcing might allow for the discovery of an unthought-of idea — kind of like winning the lottery — but how do you guarantee that the most qualified individuals will participate? Is it crowdsourcing? Or a pie bake-off?
TV advertising used to work like this: you sat on your sofa while creatives were paid to throw a bucket of shit in your face. Today you’re expected to sit on the bucket, fill it with your own shit, and tip it over your head while filming yourself on your mobile. Then you upload the video to the creatives. You do the work; they still get paid.
In Forbes.com, Dan Woods recently wrote a well constructed piece, based on Netflix’s recent algorithm crowdsourcing project, warning that the word itself is misleading. He posits that it is still the exceptional individuals in the herd which drive the real innovation and discovery.
So surely brands need to be crowdsurfing rather than crowdsourcing – not getting bogged down in the lowest common denominator but finding ways to help the really exciting stuff to rise to the top?
This reminds me of Francesco D’Orazio‘s presentation for WOM UK back in November, when he described Face’s approach to research. They combine a wide initial crowdsourcing approach with a more focused co-creation stage that gathers a select few opinion leaders to test the best ideas and nail down specific proposals for activity – meaning you get both individual and group thinking, bottom and top down structures. It makes sense.
There are plenty of crowdsourcing communities which promote quality as well as quantity and ensure members are rewarded in a way consummate with their expertise – check out Blur Designs or Bush Green. But it’s also true that ‘crowdsourcing’ is rapidly becoming a media buzzword applied with dubious strategy or integrity. It will be interesting to see whether ‘the crowd’ become more reluctant to share their insights and graft, and how creative brands become in filtering those opinions and making them an effective part of their feedback loop in a way that engages, but doesn’t exploit, the public.
What do you think? Have been part of a crowdsourcing project and how did you feel? How do you think the practice will evolve and who is doing it best, and worst, right now?
“Our goal is not to have the most reviews; instead we strive to have the best and most trusted word-of-mouth B2B referrals on the planet…[we] review each and every recommendation before it is posted to our community of users…If we are not certain that the review is valid, we will contact the two parties (the client and the vendor) to determine if there is indeed a relationship between them. If we cannot verify it that they did business together, we will not post that vendor review.”
As long as their mods don’t prevent the painful truth from also coming through, VendorCity have made a good move. Self-moderation works well for many online communities, but it’s doubtless that when you’re making B2B decisions, proven transparency and trust are key.
“Google provides a platform and a network that enables others to succeed – and when they succeed, so does Google. That is a millennium apart from the centralised, controlling ways of business past.”
He goes on to cite beta testing as a great example of how a brand can turn the fear of offering an imperfect product on its head, by letting consumers into the design process at an incomplete stage:
“unthinkable under old rules and expectations”.
There’s certainly been a bit of beta backlash by now – we’re fed up with half-arsed offerings pleading special status – but the psychology holds true.
Ways of fostering brand loyalty and engagement have transformed from the days of the Mad Men – we don’t want a reassuring Big Daddy any more, we want to feel we’re running the show. But open source agoraphobia is extremely common amongst brands. Faced with the seeming chaos and irreverence of word of mouth and social media, their instinct is usually to try and find ever more cunning and self-protective ways to maintain control. Seeing vulnerability as a virtue is very difficult when you consider marketing as a tool for projecting a flawless façade to the world.
This doesn’t mean that brands abandon all control; the trick is to facilitate positive and creative open source sharing and collaboration in a spirit of progress and playfulness. But when user generated content is predicted to make up 70% of online material by 2010, the only thing they can’t do is pretend this behaviour is something they can or should suppress or ignore.
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