Brands cast advertisements on radio and TV because potential
customers spend a significant amount of time here. They put up huge billboards
on busy roads. They insert flyers in the morning newspaper. They even find
their way into the morning newspaper. With all of these, the brand is trying to
find its way to where it expects its potential customers to be, and then
exploit that opportunity to create an impression in their minds, stay there and
eventually find a place in their lives. With more and more people spending more
and more of their time on electronic devices, it was obviously not long before
brands figured that that was the new place to be. And so it’s no wonder that
the new buzzword of the 21st century has been ‘Digital Marketing’.
Digital marketing has given brands a brand new canvass to splash on, and they
have made the most of it. Or maybe a tad too much of it, if one were to look at
it from the perspective of the end recipients, who are often annoyed with the deluge
of promotional mails, texts, advertisements which keep them from the
interesting video that want to watch on Youtube or ads which pop-up while they
play Fruit Ninja on their smart phones. All in all, digital marketing has
become a two edged sword and if you don’t do it right you run the risk of
pushing customers away rather than pulling them closer.
So how do brands exploit the great potential that Digital
marketing has to offer to find a place in their consumer’s lives but do so in a
way that is not intrusive?
One of the best innovations in the sphere of digital
marketing, in the recent past has been the use of QR codes for greater customer
engagement, and these abstract black and white square tiles, I think, have the
potential to be the one of the biggest game changers in Digital marketing in the
near future. QR codes, originally used to track parts in vehicle manufacturing
have become very popular in consumer advertising. QR has allowed brands to
enhance customer experience and in a non-invasive way. QR codes are being used
in virtual super markets in Korea, where customers can simply scan the QR code
for the products they want to buy and the shipment is delivered home. Starbucks
is using QR codes to reduce customer waiting time. [1] Angry birds
had an eye-catching ad, which was basically just a QR code that took you
directly to the download page. [2]
QR codes have great potential and provide multiple avenues
to engage with customers, be it attracting customers to the brand’s websites, promotional
offers that have something on offer for every scan, or making the final step of
actually buying the product easier. And they are biggest selling point is that
they are non-invasive. They make the customers come to you rather than going the
other way round, which has three major advantages – one, it makes it easy to
identify interested customers and hence the market that the brand might want to
target, second - saves on a lot of money spent on aimless advertisement, and
third – is a great alternative to the intrusive e-mails, texts and pop-up ads.
To sum it up, I think QR codes can be the next big thing in
Digital marketing. It’s just a scan away.
