QR Codes Compared to Text Marketing

March 29, 2011 by Jessica Zorawski

Recently many companies have created marketing campaigns that include QR codes. These are literally bar codes that people can scan in order to receive a coupon to their phone, connect to a website, or show a picture. Sounds very good… in theory.

There are limitations with QR codes for many reasons. People must have a phone that has the capacity to hold applications, which is still only about 30 percent of the US market. Text messages are a much more common method of communication with 1.1 trillion SMS messages sent in 2010 in the United States, according to Informa. Nielsen reported this year that 90 percent of Americans send and receive messages. It is quite clear that you can reach a much larger portion of the population via text.

Another disadvantage within the application space of QR codes is that there is a lack of standardization. For example, if you were to create an application you would have to create several for various platforms. For example, Microsoft Tag only allows their users to access applications on their system. So your customers would need to understand which reader to use to be able to read the QR code, as well as which application to open, and when.

Since SMS has a wider reach, is easier for the greater population to use and is faster to access, it is a much more convenient way to communicate your marketing message to your target population.

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Tags: Nielsen, QR Codes

Posted in: Industry specific, Info, Knowledge base, Mobile statistics