Cracking the Code, a Barcode Marketing Infographic

This is the most comprehensive QR Code infographic I’ve come across up to now. It’s a great barcode marketing breakdown and deals with picking the right barcode marketing solution, elaborate growth statistics and real world brand use.

As usual scroll down to the bottom for my summary and comment. Be ready for a big scroll, this infographic is 4320px long Thanks for the guys at The Awesome Blog for making it.

I learned something interesting here. If you’re looking for the right barcode technology for your marketing campaign let’s consider the reason for looking at the alternatives to QR Codes with a few questions:

• is your target audience more likely to use MMS rather than Mobile internet?
• will the target audience be unlikely to have a barcode scanner (for QR Codes or Microsoft tags)? or will it be hard to install one for them?
• are you willing to pay for generating the barcodes?
• do you really need to have your logo, fully uncluttered on the barcode?

If you answered positive to all these questions you can consider SnapTags as an alternative. That’s what the infographic says and I wholeheartedly agree. The way SpyderLynk works is by sending a picture of the logo over to their services and returning you marketing message in the response. Works great to reach people with even basic phones, but you’ll make them pay for MMS and their phone should be set up for it too.

I can tell you right off the bat that MMS will not work in Belgium, the operators do a lousy job at supporting the technology and it’s horribly expensive. That said, it might work in other countries, I can imagine that it’s a different landscape in America and Asia, but I doubt other parts of Europe. As far as my research has told me using QR Codes is your best bet to reaching the most people at this time.

Other things to learn from the infographic:

• from a publisher standpoint each type of barcode can provide the same kind of services for tracking
• 30-40% of all smartphone users have downloaded a barcode scanning app
• barcode scanning was a huge hit during the holiday season, accounting for 57% of the tracked scans in 2010
• main target markets are grocery and personal care products (figures most peopel scanning are women)
• barcode marketing isn’t for targeting children (for now), 30% of the people scanning are aged 35-44
• most people scanning barcodes have a reasonably high house hold income
• industry leaders have chosen QR Codes as their preferred barcode marketing solution

The conclusion that popularity of barcode scanning during the holiday may be based on an aberration, the numbers are based on the 2010 holiday season and late in that year QR Codes started trending heavily, so the conclusion is probably based on a coincidence. The next holiday season will tell, but I predict another spike around that time. I’ll be sharing more of my personal research in the near future so stay tuned and subscribe to the newsletter.

I’ve been out of blogging for a few weeks as I started my new job at Agency.com a part of TBWA as Project Manager, managing digital project. And what better way to start again than with this nice QR Code infographic.