The Digital Notebook of Joanna Beltowska

I recently returned from a 10-day trip to Stockholm, Sweden. While I was there, I came across three interesting ads that all incorporated scannable codes.

I spotted the first one while waiting for the bus (click to enlarge).

This is the Swedish Pensions Agency advertising a new service that lets people forecast their pensions. Readers can download the app by scanning the QR code in the bottom right. There’s only a hint to what the code does: “Get The Pensions Prognosis Application!”). It seems like it would be more straightforward to download the app by simply searching for it.

I found the second ad in an issue of Swedish Metro.

This is Bonnier’s Art Gallery advertising a new fall exhibition. The ad states that the exhibition isn’t for everyone and decidedly not for you, but if you scan the QR code you’ll get a free admission ticket that you can give to someone better suited. This is a bit quirky and very opinionated, which feels like a good context for QR codes. The payoff is good – sure, you’re gonna have to put in a little bit of effort scanning the code, but you’ll get free admission to an art exhibition!

The third one is also a Metro find.

Bokus.com is an online bookstore and in this case, they’re trying to reach students stocking up on literature for the fall term. The headline reads “This ad is really a bookstore for students”. The ad further explains that if you download the Bokus.com app, you’ll be able to buy books by scanning the barcodes in the ad. On first thought, it seems like a really compelling idea – a print ad that actually is a store – but I wonder how many people will actually download the app.

A majority of marketing executions involving QR codes seem to fail to

1. explain to users what the codes are and how to use them. Keep in mind that only a very small minority of users actually use QR codes, despite the fact that the technology has been around in the US on a noticeable scale, and seemingly in the public’s eye, since 2008.
2. provide users with enough motivation to go through with the action of scanning the code in order to get to the prize on the other side.

(If you’re interested, Aaron Dignan’s book Game Frame digs deeper into these two as symptoms of user inhibition and disengagement within systems – well worth the read.)

Perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but Malcolm Gladwell’s article “The Pitchman” comes to mind. It tells the story of Ron Popeil who re-invented the product pitch and built a multi-million dollar empire selling kitchen gadgets. Gladwell argues that in order to disrupt someone’s behavior, you have to explain the use cases of your product over and over again:

[ The Chop-O-Matic] represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers– not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.

Brands that use QR codes are asking their consumers to rethink the way they interact with the brand. They’re asking people to find and install an app to read the codes with, and then to scan the code in order to access some information. This may sound like little effort, but it’s enough to dissuade people from even bothering.

Which brands, if any, have ever pitched the QR code to their audience?

It’s easy to see why QR codes are attractive to marketers:

1. There’s no licensing cost.
2. The technology is standardized and open-source.
3. There’s no additional cost for integration – just add the code to your campaign material.
4. QR codes have been popular in Asia for some time. Surely they could become popular in the US and Europe too?
5. The consumer reach is, in theory, pretty good. QR codes aren’t quite phone agnostic quite yet, but most smartphones support free 3rd party readers. Google’s Android OS and RIM’s Blackberry both support QR codes through native readers. Apple’s iOS on the other hand does not include a QR code reader (but there’s plenty of 3rd party apps available). The Windows 7 phone will have native support through its bing search app.
6. Lastly, but most importantly: QR codes provide brands with an additional measurement channel.

Through the use of QR codes, marketers get access to new exciting metrics like the click-through rate for real-world items coupled with timestamps as well as geographical and demographical data. Swedish startup Mopper illustrate this very clearly in their online sales pitch – measurement is a huge selling point.

The Mopper team doesn’t stop at just measurement; they make the natural progression to QR code-enabled sales. Apart from providing a QR code reader, the app also ties together QR codes with commerce, creating an additional sales channel. This I actually like a lot, provided it’s the right situation. Just like in one of the Mopper videos, I’d love to be able to buy show tickets directly from a poster rather than having to remember to do it when I get home or trying to navigate Ticketmaster’s frustrating website on my phone. [Sidenote: Mopper has cleverly rotated the QR code, added their logo to its top right corner and named the result 'mopper tag'. Rings nicer than 'QR code', doesn't it?]

A concluding thought. If you’re a brand manager, planner or marketer and you’re considering incorporating QR codes into your next campaign, ask yourself this: can you afford to onboard your audience in the usage of QR codes while keeping them motivated through the process?

Is a second cup before 10 am too audacious?

Having known of CreativeMornings for quite some time, I finally made the decision to attend one of their talks and managed to snag a ticket to July’s lecture with John Maeda (assisted by Becky Bermont). If you’re not familiar with CreativeMornings, they’re an organization that hosts free breakfast lectures on a range of creative topics in four different locations around the world. Really good stuff.

John Maeda is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), as well as an artist, designer, computer scientist and author. He gave a short talk on creative leadership, inspired by the work that he did with Bermont in preparation for their book on leadership; together they printed and analyzed Maeda’s tweets to see what insights these digital short-form messages held about him as a leader. Maeda and Bermont distilled their findings into six principles for creative leaders. By coining these principles, they hope to raise awareness of the value of artistic thinking in a leadership context.

Without further ado, I give you John Maeda’s principles for creative leadership:

1. Build From Foundations
Sketching, drawing and the study of raw data are excellent starting point to any creative process. “Artists have to get their hands dirty, starting with core foundations and basic principles.”

2. Craft The Team
Don’t be a lone wolf creative person. Work with your team. Make sure to craft your team wisely; to do great work, you need great material.

3. Sense Actively
Our world is changing rapidly. The structures of our organizations have grown more complex as we’ve gone from organizational trees with clear hierarchies and communication paths to complex and intertwined organizational networks. These organizational changes are felt everywhere and as a leader, it’s in your interest to quickly sense them and try to understand them.

Artists sense their surroundings and communicate their impressions through their art. Maeda likens them to kitemakers who sense the wind and with their kites help others to see it. Leaders should take inspiration from this and try to reflect the winds that they are sensing in their work.

4. Take Leaps
Artists are risk takers. They ask questions (“Why is it this way? Why is it not?”) and take leaps based on the answers they find. Leaders are understandably not as eager to do this but in an increasingly complex world, leaders benefit from looking to how artists approach the process of finding good ideas.

Maeda describes a pyramid of skills that facilitate idea generation (Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination). Click for full version.

The top half is the most strategic span for leaders today. People generally get stuck in the bottom half because they’re afraid of taking risks (Becky chimed in to say that this is especially true for women who often set out to find the right solution in projects). Leaders should welcome more freedom in their process and not strive to be perfect; just jump in, get your hands dirty and try out different things.

5. Fail Productively
Artists fail often, but they recover quickly; they fail productively. They connect and reuse old failures and in doing so they create new things. A CEO can facilitate productive failure by connecting people and ideas. As a leader, which two people can you connect to spark a new idea or to provide a solution to someone’s problem?

6. Grow From Critique
Artists are hungry for critique because they are eager to change and grow into their fullest potential. Anyone in a leadership position is going to be exposed to critique. So how does one grow from this critique without losing oneself? The answer, according to Maeda, is to have confidence and to use the 6 principles.

If you’d like to read more:
John Maeda’s Creative Leadership blog http://creativeleadership.com/
Patti Brennan’s Hierarchy of Imagination: http://creativeleadership.com/brennans-hierarchy-of-imagination