QR Codes have been around for a couple years now and just recently I encountered some prevalent marketing strategies used for capturing and engaging customers.

A QR Code (for the uninformed) is a little square that your camera scans and it usually takes you to a website or an app download page.

These little codes have been used during the pandemic to produce menus in a variety of restaurants. Users would scan the code and a menu would open up.

But that’s a basic strategy.

Lets move on to some more advanced stuff you can do with QR Codes.

 

 

 

 

Easter Egg Hunt

A Distro’s Coffee out in Manhattan recently used QR Codes to deploy a trading card game.

With each purchase you get a unique QR Code on your drink, and the QR code would lead to another drink not on the public menu.

This led to some interesting results. Now people were exchanging QR Codes and doing all they could to collect all the drink combinations.

On top of that, these drinks were consistently created every week, the company designed more than 200 combinations.

There are a total of 200 QR Codes to scan and this drives engagement because of the following

 

 

 

 

Completionist Mentality

There are few people who are prone to collecting things.

They collect cards, games, and other artifacts simply because they feel owning all of them increase their status as a person.

They are prone to this type of marketing and are more likely to engage with it.

QR Codes in this collective card manner will bring you not only short term profits, but long term results.

For the short term profits, let’s do some math just for fun.

There’s 200 codes you can collect in total

The average drink costs about $6

6 x 200 = $1200

So minimum you’re going to make $1200 if you hit this type of person with this type of marketing.

However, we’re excluding the probability of duplicates.

3 of these codes are only seen 3 out of 100 drinks.

So, there’s a chance he’ll be paying for 97 drinks to get one QR Code.

97 x 6 = $582

Remember, these figures are additional profits from each customer.

There’s a chance you’ll make $582 off this customer if you factor in the rare QR Codes.

That’s just the probability of the rarest ones though. Each QR Code has it’s own rarity.

Collecting all of them would cost somewhere above $1,000 just because rarity of each code is factored in.

But they also want to try the secret drinks they captured, this factors in more money as well.

 

 

 

 

Finding “The One”

This strategy has multiple purposes to it.

Not only was it designed to maximize revenue but it was also designed to take a new customer and make this cafe their new home.

Therefore, each secret drink has it’s own personality to it.

The “Traveler’s Mocha” for instance

Just from the title you know exactly who this drink is for, it’s for anybody just passing through.

Other names could be the “The Trucker’s Delight” or “The Tourist’s Tea”.

Travelers will instantly look at that and go “That drink was made for me”.

If your customers find a product made for them within the codes, you’ve made them feel more at home.

 

 

 

 

Acquiring Commitment

With a dentist I worked with I did something interesting.

I had recently learned that just by changing body language you can control your emotions.

By changing your body language to match how your body responds to certain emotions, you actually trigger that emotion and feel it.

So I thought…

What if time was the same way.

You see, the more you like something the more time you spend with it

But, what if the more time you spent with something the more you liked it

and the more the value of that thing mentally increases.

So, back to my dentist experiment.

He wanted to raise his prices and have less patients.

However whenever he did so he was met with backlash.

One star reviews and complaining customers.

My solution? Make patients wait in the waiting room for longer.

Instead of a 45 minute to an hour wait we made it an hour and a half to two hour wait.

To you this may seem like the worst dental practice in the world, but once

you’re on the inside your being played to my influence and your brain is being tricked.

To make it seem it likes something more than it actually does.

Now, back to the collectibles strategy.

Think about how much time it would take to collect some of these drinks.

Think about how much time they would spend if they found their favorite drink.

There’s now not only a chance for more profit but now there’s a chance for more regulars.

Just by setting up some webpages and printing some cheap QR Code stickers you can have more profit and more regulars than any café in your town (or whatever business you’re in).

Think about how many locations you could open by implementing this.

Think about all the new things you could buy and all the free time you could have.

This truly is a million dollar secret.

Collectibles. Implement them somehow.

 

 

Advertising

We all see those posters hung one after another on telephone poles.

We all see the dispersed flyers among restaurant tables and bulletin boards.

All of them usually containing the following, a place with a phone number, location and maybe (if you’re lucky) a sexy little quote.

But they all look the same.

Now imagine a blank piece of paper with big bold letters that say “scan me”.

Nothing more.

Well that’s kind of what Coinbase did.

Here’s an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal inside an article titled “Beware of QR Code Scams”

‘’’

During the Super Bowl in February, one ad grabbed a lot of attention: a mysterious bouncing QR code that enticed viewers to point their phones at their screens and click through to an unknown website. (Spoiler alert: It was for Coinbase) Within seconds, more than 20 million people had done just that, crashing the cryptocurrency-exchange platform.

‘’’

The flyer idea is using Coinbase’s advertising as a template.

It works for the following reason

 

 

 

 

Mystery Bias.

In Robert Cialdini’s book “Pre-Suasion” he talks about the bias of mystery and how everyone is in need of closure.

A page with no context is a mystery and so everyone must find closure by scanning.

The QR Code could be anything your imagination can conjure up.

• A News Article
• A Blog Post
• A Collectible NFT

Anything you can think of.

Now using Mystery Bias to our advantage we could easily put thousands of these inside a big city like L.A or New York and everyone would be influenced to scan them.

Easy low-cost advertising (the cost of printing one of these things is $3 – $6)

Imagine how many new customers would come in just by using these stickers.

 

 

 

 

Conclusion

Well, it appears these little codes can be not only used to attract new customers but also to transform cold customers into loyal regulars.

What will the future hold for QR Codes as the world moves into augmented and virtual reality?

When the world moves forward I’ll be here to write about it.

So stay tuned.