I recently had the privilege of spending time in Tokyo, Japan and as I was traversing the city, I started to notice something everywhere I went: Everything from food packages to bus stop advertisements to billboard signs all had this strange little barcode-looking icon located somewhere on them. Assuming it was some Japanese incarnation of the American bar code, I promptly ignored them.

That is until I saw a gaggle of Japanese school girls, all in matching school uniforms, standing around a poster of football star David Beckham, holding their cell phones out, giggling and whispering to one another, as if sharing some sort of secret. I moved closer to try and catch a glance of whatever they were looking at, when one questioning young lady swept her phone across the strange glyph in the corner of the poster, the same symbol that I had been seeing all over the city, and immediately joined in on the laughter, snickering with appreciative joy. With just a quick scan, the glyph directed their phone browser to an advertisement web site full of racy images of the famous player. Thus was my introduction to Quick Response codes.

Just recently I have started to see these in American culture, most notably on a colleague's business card. According to Wikipedia, one of the earliest appearances of QR in western culture was on the cover of a 2007 Pet Shop Boys single which, when scanned correctly, directed users to the Pet Shop web site. At a recent trade show I attended, I noticed one exhibit that had used the QR in the corner of each panel. Upon a scan of the code, the user received a vCard entry of the company, including address, phone number, email and URL. While researching this article, I discovered that Facebook will soon be implementing QR codes for individual pages that will hold a myriad of personal info about the person or page.

So what kind of application does this have in regards to marketing? How many times have you gotten an email or seen an advertisement (regardless of the vehicle) and thought, "Hmm, I'll have to check that out.", only to forget about it later? Say you send an email advert to a potential client. The client gets the email, finds interest in your product, makes a mental note to visit your site at a later time, and then promptly forgets about it in light of the bombardment of other advertising media, whether it be interactive, television or print. Now imagine that same email advert with an easy to scan QR code containing all your contact information. A quick swipe of the phone and all your important information goes directly into their contacts, and opens up your URL in their phone browser, giving you not one but three distinctly different impressions, all within the span of a few seconds. Not only do they get access to your site immediately, but the next time they need your service you're already in their phone-book and just a click away. In Japan, you can stitch together QR codes to deliver multimedia such as mp3's and even video!

Of course there are two drawbacks to this type of "data marketing": awareness and technology. If your audience isn't aware of the capabilities of these QR codes, they aren't going to know to scan it, and therefore will not be getting the intended information. And if your audience has a phone that doesn't support QR reading, there's no way for them to get the intended data. However these circumstances are becoming less and less of a possibility. Android and Blackberry both have apps available that read QR codes very accurately. iPhone has several apps available that tout QR scanning, but only a few can read entire codes. Windows Mobile also has a few add-ons that are getting decent reviews, and some non-smartphones are capable of reading QR as well.

The real trick here is getting the American market familiar with the QR technology. When using these codes as part of your marketing arsenal, try by-lines, sub-text or call-outs that bring attention to the interactivity of the code glyph. I witnessed some very effectives billboards in Japan (such as the one pictured above) that were dominated by only the QR code and a small instruction to "snap it" in Japanese. One can't help but become intrigued by this type of advertising. Why would a company spend that kind of money to display an image such as this? Referring to the glyph by name within your advertising medium will also induce many viewers to look it up via search engines and the internet. And in addition to delivering pertinent information to your market in a quick, easy-to-use format, you also bill yourself as a technologically savvy company with a firm grasp of the latest tech trends! Happy Marketing!