Mobile Barcodes: Dead or Alive?

I put some thoughts around this onto my blog a while back:
http://brandappeal.blogspot.co...

..overall, the barcoding mess is a user experience nightmare and until fixed, the best option out there IMO is JAGTAG hands down:
http://www.jagtag.com/index.ph...

Barcodes and the types of barcodes (beyond QR) used are going to change the consumer landscape in a very powerful way. It is also going to create a slew of real time consumer processing in marketing. Beyond shopsavey.. Personal sales. Scanned that shirt, but didn't buy it? Now it’s in your "remind" inventory and oh boy are we going to "remind you" Scanned it and left the store..10% off Right at you.15% off and a free item if you come back to the store within the next 15 minutes-just for you, personalised. "Now I'm the reporter!" is now the the consumer with the pricegun as well-and its a mobile pricegun.
And the SAS AND SPSS gurus are gonna have a field day.

I also live in Japan and a pretty cool use that could be implemented to get this rolling.. Codes on business cards.. Its pretty nice to get a card and then scan in the person's data to your phone address book.

It is possibly true to say that until competent barcode scanners come as standard in most phones then the QR codes will not have the kind of impact that they do in Japan.
I am optimistic that phone makers will incorporate better camera's, lenses, and readers in their future models.
I am in Japan and work for SET Japan kk, a creative agency that amongst other things is responsible for taking QR's and branding them to fit perfectly alongside a clients marketing campaign.
Japanese phones come with custom scanners which scan immediately giving us greater play over reincorporating the design. (Plus having a skilled team to make sure they work).
www.setjapan.com
You can see some success we have had with clients such as Louie Vuitton and Marc Jacobs, whose designer codes enticing people to scan increased traffic to their mobile sites and made their own little splash on the fashion blogosphere, being picked up by over 200 and a 100 blog sites respectively.
http://setjapan.wordpress.com/...
http://setjapan.wordpress.com/

Mobile Marketing is not going away and is almost a common sense requirement that it be integrated into Brands strategies,
Of course my opinion will seem biased but as soon as hardware technology catches up with Japans standard, as is often the direction of flow, then we may see that the use of QR far from being written off, may well have only just started.

Great article. Nothing can beat the availability of 1D barcodes on practically every product.

But even then you could just type off the code on the keyboard, even without camera phone.

Therefore, what makes or breaks a barcode reader is the ability to turn the 12 or 13 digit code into a product name that can be plugged into a search engine, to display whatever information is available, be it health advisories, nutrional information, ratings or price quotes.

I have been trying to just that with ZebraScan. It is available for free for various Nokia phone models and in review with the iTunes App Store. Even without a camera phone there is a very simple mobile query field at app.zebrascan.net/uyuni.

You raise two very interesting points in your post that got me thinking. The first, around the usability of 2D barcodes, is something we’ve come across and is the subject of some debate in the office (we are a mobile agency). Last year, we saw a campaign launch in the UK which used 2D codes in a guerilla sticker campaign. Much like your example, if you couldn’t read the code you were asked to go a mobile URL to download the reader. Once downloaded (it was a 1MB file!), you scanned the code and were then directed to (wait for it) a mobile URL! I guess we can all see the logic fail here, and, not wanting to open a bag of worms, I smell the hands of technologists and perhaps PR teams on these types of campaigns - not people who focus on usability or have a lot of regard for reach. If you have to go through such a rigmarole to get to a URL, you can pretty much guarantee that participation levels are going to be pretty low.

That said, 2D codes are still pretty ‘cool’. They look good, and there is a magical effect when they work, especially when you use them for the first time. They can add a sense of the unpredictable and the novel to a marketing campaign. However, I guess that without standardisation we are, at best, going to see these codes used as an adjunct to campaigns, in a low-volume in-the-know kind of way. I don’t want to dismiss them, 2D codes are, of course ‘big in Japan’, with whole magazines just full of them, but then so is raw fish. There is, however, a type of barcode that is already out there and in use day in day out.

You refer to using barcodes to get info on FMCG goods, which reminded me of a semi-Eureka moment I had in my bathroom a couple of months back. Without going into too much detail, I had ‘some time on my hands’ and was playing with my new HTC Magic G2 Android phone, which has a built-in barcode reader. With no 2D codes to hand, I decided to try and scan some of the common-or-garden barcodes that were on the items I had in the bathroom. The reader on the device contained a ‘product lookup’ feature, so I decided to give it a go. My reading material (last weekend’s Observer, a copy of Viz), both had standard barcodes on the back, but didn’t come up with anything. The FMCG goods, like shampoo etc, all worked and pushed me to retail sites using google’s online product search. So, from this you can see that from one side of the chain at least, the technology and infrastructure is already in place to allow mobile users to discover more about and potentially interact with most retail items, including publications, CDs, books, FMCG items etc etc.

Take the FMCG example; if you hooked up a grocery application (like Ocado’s iPhone app in the UK) with a standard barcode scanner, then potentially you could walk around your kitchen scanning in the regular items for your weekly shop, as if you were your own cashier. If it made the loud ‘beep’ each time it recognised a product that would make the experience even sweeter!

That’s quite a pedestrian example (if you’ll excuse the weak play on words), but with so much barcode data being associated with products of all types, it would be fairly easy to say, create a pretty seamless experience for anything from artist information and gig tickets (from a CD), price comparison and ordering (for any number of goods), links to mobile content sites (from the barcode on publications like newspapers) and, of course, plain old marketing campaigns, using dressed-up barcodes. Some of these things are already being done, and, as per 2D codes, you still need the reader on the phone, but with half the job done (standard barcodes on products and online retail and information systems already driven by them) they seem the obvious choice - if a little one-dimensional!

Simon Liss
MD We Love Mobile

I think one of the things that doomed 2D codes is the lack of readers. Apart from Symbian smartphones (and later, the iPhone), I've never seen a 2D barcode reader pre-installed on any phone, branded or not. It's a code that cannot be decoded by most normobs, however helpful it might have been.

Fully agree with this note. Glad to read some realistic writing about 2D codes, which still generates 2 calls / week from excited clients...

Let's sum it up : mobile bar codes COULD have helped to solve the well known accessibility problem that's related to mobile internet. It could have fixed a "usage issue" : so many people could use mobile internet more often if it was more accessible (what url to go to, where to enter it...)

But 2D codes created another usage issue : apart from asia, it was never part of our daily lives. And could not become part of it given its bad launch and poor marketing.

So how about solving a usage issue with another usage issue. Ain't work.

As you say, convergence is around the corner : unique urls whatever the screen, easy to find where to type it, accessibility through apps, ease of 1st time accessibility (appstore and the likes)...

2D codes are doomed, even more because gencodes clearly are mainstream, featured on all products, and readable using a handset.... (hey, did you ever think FMCGs were going to find room on packagings to add another piece of (ugly) code)