Does the average person know what to do with a QR code?

When I first started seeing them it took me at least a few minutes of googling to learn the term "QR code" and then another few minutes to figure out what app I needed. I consider myself fairly tech savvy for some in a non-tech profession, so it wasn't a big deal to me, but it was enough of an effort that I assume a huge number of people would have given up.

Do Android phones come with QR readers built in? The iPhone requires a 3rd party app, unless I'm missing something.

Though one thought I've had is that QR codes actually benefit from being abstruse. A written URL is pretty much expected and easily ignored. But a weird looking barcode seems like it could generate some curiosity.

They may work for a direct impulse buy for something priced low enough that people would casually pay it, or for bolstering brand awareness. Either way, I think they market to a situation-specific demographic. A cheap test campaign designed to measure response couldn't hurt.

I never got into it. Dumb-phone user here :(

The only time I've found them helpful is when I've been in front of a product at a big-box store and there were no employees around; scanning the QR code brought up all the product info in more detail than big-box employees were likely to know, so that was nice. At least for introverted me.

And I've often wanted to scan them in magazine ads, but I don't generally have my phone immediately available.

From the marketing side, I left the field before they came in, so I don't know what best practices are, but I find it hard to believe they'd add a lot to normal marketing materials. As Ardiril says, I'd find them useful in direct-purchase situations or in more "brand awareness" advertisements.

I'm not a marketer, but I've very rarely used them as an end user. I don't really think they add anything and I know on my phone, I have to use a barcode scanner app to scan them. At the 5k on Saturday, they had them put on our bibs so we could get our race results 30 minutes after we finished, but I tried it once and it didn't really work and I got an email an hour or so later with my results anyways.

I've used them to make "check in" urls for people, but they don't always work. Some phones will do it right from the camera; others need an app and who wants to do that?

I'm kind of with mullacc; they're just noise unless they were a little less random (like a smilie) or something visually appealing.

They remind me of CueCat.

The only time I've ever found them useful was when I was living in NYC and on certain bus routes, you could scan the QR code (using a barcode scanner app I think I downloaded) and it would tell you how far away the bus was from the stop you were at. I wish they could do this with all of the bus routes in NYC.

They have them at some museum exhibits; some link to a related video, some to company websites.

Have "smart" phone -- have never used them. Invariably pointless. Why wouldn't I just Google the required info?

Sometimes. Usually when they seem to do something very handy and otherwise tough to get like the video guide via QR code I recently got with a heart rate watch.

the company I work for is just starting to put them on the covers of the products we make (industrial equipment). they link to a webpage with the instruction manual, and if you're lucky a video of a tech setting the product up.

Yep, I like them. They are showing up as ways in to an interpretive channel at museums, galleries, and public sites - for instance, in Gloucester, MA, they now have a Harborwalk you can experience on your mobile device. You walk around the city and encounter a little panel every so often - the QR code opens up the audio and video content for that location, like interviews with a commercial fisherman when you're standing on the wharf, or an Italian folk song for the old Italian neighborhood.

In that kind of situation it's fantastically useful - nobody's really going to bother entering unique URLs to bring up the content, but activating the code is easy.

To me, it seems obvious that something like this is going to become more common. Perhaps the actual interface will be less clunkily multistep, but being able to activate content simply without having to enter anything seems like a natural to me.

A lot of people rail about them, but I think the problem is that their usual application is to deliver some dull and crappy marketing content, not to deliver tools or content people are actually interested in. And that's a failure of understanding the nature of relational marketing, not a failure of QR codes. Of course once you try 10 of them and all you get is a crummy Ovaltine commercial, you're going to think they're stupid. But the underlying idea is excellent, and, assuming we really are heading into a technological era that's all about embedding IRL, we're going to need something that functions like this. THe hope is just that the content will be generally more interesting.

I cannot remember the source at the moment, but I remember seeing a study showing a vanishingly small percentage of people ever use QR codes, even among self-described "power users" who know how to. Like, less than 5%.