Here is a super cool video (retweeted by kevinrose) of a retailer in Korea using QR codes in a very clever way.
The gist of the video is that people in Korea are very busy, work hard, and don’t have a lot of time to go grocery shopping. What Homeplus (formerly Tesco) is doing is bringing the grocery shopping experience to places like subway stations so that commuters can stock their cupboards while they wait for their commuter trains. All of this is accomplished courtesy of some giant billboard posters that are scale representations of grocery aisles, complete with QR codes under each product for easy ordering.
Why is this so clever? Because what Homeplus has done is to take online behaviour and marry it to something physical: in this case, scanning a QR code leads to fresh produce being delivered. I think that if you really want to engage people online, there needs to be some real-world affects of that online behaviour. Technology is all fine and great, but people still live at least some of their lives offline. Rewarding online behaviour with strictly online rewards is one thing, but if you can reward online behaviour with something real…well, now we’re getting somewhere.
Like the Kinect, I think the real power of QR codes is only just being tapped. It’s going to be really cool to see what people start to do with this technology in the months (and weeks) to come.
