A QR Code Case Study

Casey Ferrell is a research analyst at Cutting Edge Information. He will be guest blogging at IIR’s upcoming ePharma Summit 2012 (February 6-8, 2012 in New York City). You can find him on Twitter or over on his company’s blog.

Love them or hate them, QR codes represent an opportunity to leverage smartphones into personal marketing devices. And with Black Friday upon us, I thought it an appropriate time to bring up the much maligned black-and-white squares and whether or not they represent a real marketing opportunity for life science companies.

There is no shortage of opinion about them. Google “QR codes” and you’ll get more than 10 million results. Some of them are titled with such paeans as “How to Use QR Codes for Better Conversion Rates” or “Scanning for Good: How Nonprofits Can Use QR Codes.” Some of them are titled with less enthusiastic headlines like “Death to the QR Code” and “And Now You Have One More Reason To Ignore QR Codes.”

There is also no shortage of marketing usages ranging from good to bad to downright ugly. The best uses allow consumers to engage with a brand in a unique way, often with unique online content and special incentives, that actually enhances the overall customer experience and builds loyalty, especially among demographics of people for whom smartphone technology is native. The less than great uses of QR codes often confuse the difference between a static print ad and the dynamic online user experience, leading to dead ends and unfulfilled user expectations. Or they take a user to a site that is not optimized for mobile. The most egregious uses are pretty laughable. Like the ones on the sides of moving city buses. How exactly am I supposed to scan that with my phone?

Within pharma, the potential for QR codes is even less clear. Are they good for building customer retention and loyalty? Can they really drive traffic to product websites or compel people to ask their doctor about a drug? Or are they better suited to HCPs, who are more technologically savvy than the average individual and whose smartphone adoption rates are through the roof? If so, what kind of content would satisfy their professional expectations? And what physical locations are best suited for QR codes?

Readers of the ePharma Summit 2012 blog can read a case study of one company’s QR code initiative by downloading my white paper. The case study examines a DTC QR code campaign situated within doctors’ offices that is using traditional ROI measures and attempts to leverage existing collateral and medical education expertise into a mobile-friendly experience.

To our U.S. readers, best wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving; to our international readers, we’ll be back next week with more food for thought. And don’t forget your phones when you go shopping this weekend, you never know when you might run into a QR code coupon for that must-have item.