Every marketing blog I read right now is obsessed with QR codes. Those little black-and-white squares are showing up on billboards, cereal boxes, business cards, everywhere. The promise is beautiful: point your phone, get taken somewhere, magic.
I wanted to know if that magic is real or if it is just marketers being excited about a shiny thing. So I tested it.
My tiny experiment
I made three different QR codes, each pointing to its own tracking link so I could count scans separately:
- One on a printed flyer we handed out
- One on the bottom of an email signature
- One taped in the window of a friend’s shop
Then I waited two weeks and checked the numbers.
What happened
The flyer got a handful of scans. The shop window got almost nothing. The email signature one? Basically zero, which makes sense, because who scans a code that is already on the screen they are holding.
Here is the real problem I noticed. Half the phones around me do not even have a scanner app installed by default. So before someone can scan your clever code, they have to go download something. That is a huge ask for a poster on a wall.
What I actually learned
QR codes are not magic. They work in one narrow situation: when someone is standing still, curious, and the reward for scanning is obvious and worth it. A menu, a discount, a “scan to skip the line.” Slap one on a billboard people drive past and you are decorating, not marketing.
I am not giving up on them. I am just going to stop putting them everywhere and start putting them where a bored, curious person with a phone is standing. That is the whole trick.
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