The QR Code in the fruit bowl promised a chance to win and I like to win so… imagine my disappointment when I picked up the Chiquita Banana, pointed my iPhone at it and produced the “Cannot load QR Code” screen.
Just to be sure it wasn’t a tech error on my side, I tried it a 2nd and then a third time to make sure it wasn’t my reader. Did it work on yours?
Three times was enough. Just handling the banana that many times was beginning to turn it brown.
You know how much I love the new tools so I retreated to my computer to investigate what I might be missing. That’s when I found a detailed article by Wilson Kerr, titled “Bananas for QR Codes: The Mobile Low Hanging Fruit,” that compares what’s happening on the QR Code side with both Del Monte and Chiquita.
When Kerr published the blog about a week ago, the Chiquita Banana QR Code worked but brought up a not particularly mobile-friendly website that made you work to figure out how to win. Perhaps Chiquita has read it, too, and is working on a re-do but hasn’t pulled the QR Code stickers.
Bottom line: It’s great that companies are experimenting with the new tools, but they should also know that their customers are, too. If something doesn’t work the first time, it may impact whether a costumer tries it a second. It appears in any case that the QR Code was likely intended to drive traffic to a landing page where people could enter a recipe contest.
Personally, I think if you say on a sticker, “Scan to Win,” which the Chiquita Banana QR Code Sticker does, you should really be able to “scan and see if you won” not scan and learn how you can enter a recipe into a contest. “Scan to Enter” would have worked for that but it wouldn’t have encouraged so many to scan. What would be interesting to see are the stats on how many Scanned to Win then bounced themselves off the site, unhappy about that difference.
What do you think?
