The future of mobile tagging

Mobile tagging offers a unique opportunity for brands to interact with consumers, capture their attention, draw them into an experience, encourage purchase, foster customer relationships, or reward loyalty.

Mobile tagging sounds very technical, but essentially it is a two dimensional image encoded with information, decoded using a mobile device reader. They include QR codes, barcodes or Microsoft tags, can be applied to almost any surface and used in a variety of ways. Let’s look at creative examples of how brands are using this technology and explore how best to use it yourself.

Inspirational applications

Provide additional video content that can’t be display on a poster or billboard such as;

• Home tours on real-estate boards
• View the trailer from movie posters
• Find out more about an artist when viewing a piece in a gallery
• Displaying a video of a destination in a travel brochures.
• Health & Fitness magazines bringing a personal trainer to your living room via video fitness sessions you can do in your own time.
• Interactive TV ads
• Scavenger hunt (tourism)

Encourage Purchase

• Help customers save time and make the purchase process quick and easy. Tesco came up with a clever way of bringing the supermarket shelves to busy people in Korea, by installing them in train stations. Posters that mimicked their real supermarket shelves carried barcodes that could be scanned, and that product was put into your virtual shopping cart and all delivered to your home. This allowed time poor Koreans to buy their meat for dinner while waiting for their train.
• Connect in-store products to product review websites, increasing transparency and encouraging the person to purchase on the spot (rather than going home to do more research).
• Assist customers with tips on how to use the product. Link a code on the box to recipes or best use suggestions.
• Add notes about the products, such as offering wine tasting notes.

Post-Purchase Support

• How-to instructions (eg. Furniture construction)
• Trouble-shooting guide

Feedback loop

• Allow customers to access surveys and provide instant feedback

Tips for a better user experience

Producing content for mobile tagging is challenging, however there are a few key things to keep in mind:

• Keep in mind that the content will be viewed on a mobile, so ensure it fits the screen and it is easy to interact with.
• People have a short attention span, so keep it snappy
• The content should be consistent with what the user is expecting. It should be clear to them what they are going to get from scanning.
• You need to make the user want to take that next step, so make it motivating
• Assume that your user doesn’t know how to use the technology and provide simple instructions to reduce any barriers that stand in their way and make it easy to participate.