We caught Brenna Hanly’s QR code experiment last month, where she crafted a marketing campaign for the Boston Book Festival, placing over 150 signs with QR codes around campus.

While the campaign was partially designed to promote the festival itself, Hanly was more interested in gauging QR acceptance in the “real world,” as opposed to the advertising world where QR codes and their use are commonly understood.

Each sign Hanly created featured a quote from one of the festival’s participating authors and a custom created and tracked QR code.  Half of the signs also included instructions on how to install a QR reader on a smartphone, while the other half did not.  She wanted to test the assumption that smartphone users would be savvy enough to activate them on their own.

Hanly found the rate of QR code response to be about 0.3 percent, beating out some web banner ad campaigns, but “nothing to write home about.”  However, Hanly argued the QR code signage more effectively provided a different marketing value: stopping power.

Hanly stated that at least eight out of ten consumers who walked by the signage stopped to read it.  Although many did not act on the instructions, the signage got their attention.  It had stopping power that marketers must seriously consider.

First of all, kudos to Brenna for running a great test to help debunk some of the assumptions that folks are making today about what to do and not to do in mobile marketing.  Second of all, THANKS to Brenna for publishing this data and sharing the insights with the rest of the mobile ecosystem to help debunk some of the assumptions.

Hanly reminds the reader that “we [in the advertising world] forget that the majority of this country does not even own a smartphone capable of reading the codes,” as a precursor to her low QR engagement percentages.  I would therefore propose another test with a third group of signs.  Why not take full advantage of the stopping power of on-site engagement signage, while also increasing activation, by swapping the QR codes on the signs for an SMS call-to-action—an activation method available to virtually every mobile phone user in the US.

Why insert these extra steps into the user experience, and create unnecessary friction in the activation process?  95% of mobile users already have SMS capabilities—no installation or usage instructions required.  If Hanly’s conclusions are accurate—that the barriers to activation were not a disinterest in the on-site signage, but rather the low number of smartphone users and equally low proportion of pre-installed QR readers on those smartphones—one would expect the activation numbers to have skyrocketed by swapping the QR codes with SMS keywords and short codes.

Brenna, got a campaign coming up and want to run another test to compare another activation method?