Keep Technology in Its Place

A few decades ago, Springer-Verlag and McGraw-Hill Japan published a book I wrote titled Computer Confidence: A Human Approach to Computers. The book found an audience among businesspeople—including retailers—who weren’t sure about the best ways to profitably employ the new digital technologies.
     Thankfully, the book is out-of-print. What I wrote there is now so antiquated. But my inspiration for writing it boils up in my brain every once in a while. What did it this time was a report in Bloomberg Businessweek that consumers are tiring of Quick Response codes.
     Only a year ago, the popularity was growing for those small, square, maze-like matrices designed for scanning by shoppers’ smartphones, tablet computers, and other portable electronic devices. The scan produces a link to an internet URL. The number of monthly scans recorded by the industry’s leading code maker had mushroomed from 80,000 in 2009 to about one million in 2010 to about two million by mid-2011. In December 2011, QRs appeared in more than 8% of all magazine ads, up from fewer than 4% at the start of that year.
     Loads of consumers were moving from “What the devil is this?” to “What fun this is!” Social psychology research findings indicated the consumer dynamic gave retailers a wonderful opportunity to build good will by coaching customers to teach friends and families how to use QRs.
     What’s turning interest around these days is that as the novelty wore off, the content frequently failed to stay engaging. Scan the QR and you ended up at the home page of the store or brand’s website, and there wasn’t much exciting there. The little maze was used as evidence that a store was technologically savvy rather than as a tool for showing an instructional video or doing something else valuable to the shopper. The BBW article tells of the boxes appearing, unscannable, on a highway billboard and inside a liquor bottle.
     On the other hand, some retailers are using the technology in ways that do add value. Quiring Monuments in Seattle can engrave a QR code into a tombstone so that a scan links to a website the departed family sets up.
     Retailers are being encouraged to embrace technology even further than now. My advice is, in doing it, be sure the technology is never just an answer in search of a meaningful question. Leave that to Alex Trebek on “Jeopardy.”

Click below for more: 
Keep Your Ecommerce Easy to Use 
Unveil Quick Response Codes Through Shoppers