Hide the sketches?

Awhile back, our programmer/designer Ty posted a link, in our forum, detailing a QR code study among college students. The article itself had some pretty good information:

1. 81% of students own smartphones
2. 80% had seen QR codes
3. 21% had successfully scanned a QR code
4. 75% said they are “not likely” to scan a QR code in the future

All good information, but Ty was more interested in a particular comment on the article:

“I’m a college student not in marketing, but I stumbled in here from reddit. I’m reasonably tech savvy and have a smart phone so here are my thoughts:

I’ve never seen a QR code that comes with any copy that explains what it’s going to do, and I’ve never seen one that tells me what app I need to use the code. You could solve a lot of these problems short term by not treating it like it’s some Easter egg treat that everyone can’t wait to try. You have to tell me how I’m going to benefit and how to use it up front. Right now it’s just kind of pretentious. “Look how hip our company is, we have this meaningless bar code thingy on our pamphlet, try and figure out how to use it so you can see another ad that tells you how cool we are.” Pro tip: most normal college students hold pretentious hipsters in disdain, even if we ourselves are also pretentious hipsters in denial. Every QR code needs to come with instructions, and a tangible benefit, read: COUPONS, PRIZES, etc. Worry about making it mainstream with this first, and hopefully tech will catch up (referring to your qr code app built into the smartphone app).”

We were so intrigued by this insight that we decided to run a little QR code test of our own. Here’s how we tested:

1. We created three sets of three posters – three with just a QR code, three with a QR code and a headline (benefit), and three with a QR code, a headline, and instructions.
2. We placed these in the Stark’s building (our home) elevators.
3. We tracked the scans of each QR code type through our Hound tracking system, so we could tell exactly when and how many times each QR code type was scanned.

Our assumption was that the QR code with the benefit and instructions would win, hands down. We were wrong.

Out of 106 total scans, 48 were of the QR code only.  The QR code with a title had 32 scans and the QR code with the title and instructions garnered only 26 scans.

There are a couple of things worth noting here. First, this isn’t by any means a true scientific test. While we tried to place the posters where we thought they would all get similar traffic, we’re somewhat sure they’re not getting the exact same traffic. Next, our benefit might be lacking somewhat. Basically, we built a mobile site of the Starks Building directory and our headline said as much. We assume that if we had a headline that read “Scan for a Free Beer” the results would be dramatically different.

Still, there are a couple of things we can take away from this.

1. More people scanned the plain QR code out of sheer curiosity than did the people who scanned for the directory.
2. More people scanned the QR code with the headline only than they did the QR code with title and instruction.

So, while we can’t necessarily discount the fact that communicating a good benefit along with a QR code is better than just having a QR code, we can definitely say that putting the instructions on how to read a QR code on the poster is of little benefit.

We can also say that curiosity is a powerful factor with QR codes. Maybe being a little mysterious with your QR code ad isn’t a bad thing.