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1:00 am, April 21, 2008
QR codes - a cracking way to market

Marketing Manchester may be about to sell the city using strange symbols on bus shelters

By Joanne Birtwistle

QR codes are big in Japan and Korea, but are little used even by the marketing community in the UK. They are two-dimensional printed bar codes — take a picture of one with a mobile phone camera and it directs the handset's web browser to an internet site.

Although the name stands for “quick response” codes, they have been slow to catch on here. Now, however, Manchester Art Gallery and Marketing Manchester are looking at using them to deliver information to visitors and potential clients respectively.

Manchester Art Gallery is trialling the technology, as part of its year-long Revealing Histories: Remembering Slavery gallery trail. It is displaying the codes next to six objects on the trail. Users are taken to a mobile web page with information specifically about that object.

Helena Wetterberg's role at the gallery is to find new ways to engage visitors. She says that even getting senior management approval for the trial was problematic. “We have to be very careful about the security and financial risks involved in allowing visitors to take photographs within our gallery spaces; including any breaches of image copyright usage,” she explained.

The trial has a couple of months left to run and the gallery is still in the process of evaluating how it might use QR codes in the future. So far Wetterberg says the response has been very positive. The gallery is also looking at using QR codes to capture visitor feedback and as a wider marketing tool. Meanwhile, Marketing Manchester is in talks with online marketing company Brand Attention about running its own three-month trial, which would start in July.

The trial would run in targeted markets such as the Nordic countries, which Marketing Manchester's new media manager Stuart Aiken says are “more tech savvy”. QR codes would appear on posters and at bus stop sites, taking people to a brochure request page on their mobile.

Commonplace

QR code technology has been around for more than 10 years. It is commonplace as a logistics tool and already very popular among consumers in Japan. One big advantage of QR codes is that they can be printed anywhere a user might need information, such as in magazines, on posters, leaflets and business cards.

An obvious application is on estate agent's saleboards. Potential viewers could be directed to a web page showing pictures of the interior of the property.

In the UK, phones now often come with the reader pre-installed, although software can also be downloaded for free, so the number of people who can use them is increasing all the time.

“In Japan, 61 per cent of people who request product information do so by QR codes and there are 17 million QR code readers installed on mobile phones,” said Howard Furr-Barton of Brand Attention, which is part of the Ardwick-based Muse Group.

Furr-Barton expects QR code usage by UK consumers to grow rapidly over the next 18 months, because mobile handsets with integrated cameras and mobile internet are increasingly common and mobile internet download speeds are increasing, improving the overall usability of the technology.



COMMENTS? jbirtwistle@crain.com