Title: Whether or not to use a quick response code in the ad

Authors: Füsun F. Gönül; Chun Qiu; Evan Zhou

Addresses: School of Business, Slippery Rock University, Slippery Rock, PA 16057-1399, USA ' Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, T3A 1G5, Canada ' McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, T3A 1G5, Canada

Abstract: QR codes have a multitude of benefits for both the scanning consumers and advertisers. We empirically examine print ads in Fortune magazine to explore the factors behind a company's decision on whether or not to use QR codes in its print ads. In our model, we focus on the role of a company's past decisions as well as its competitors' past decisions. We adopt a binary logit model with multiple explanatory variables to control for advertiser type, past behaviour, and past competitive behaviour. We find that companies are likely to be influenced by their own past behaviour in their decision to use QR codes in their print ads. We also find that companies are more likely to start adopting QR codes when their competitors have done so in the past. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to examine QR codes in a descriptive, objective, multivariate, scientific study. Although the incidence of QR codes is currently low, we expect increased overall usage of QR codes in the future because of strong inertia and mimicry effects we find in our empirical investigation.

Keywords: advertising; competition; electronic marketing; e-marketing; logit model; quick response code; QR codes; print ads; print advertisements; magazines; past decisions; advertiser type; past behaviour; inertia; mimicry effects.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEMR.2016.075324

International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, 2016 Vol.7 No.1, pp.22 - 38

Received: 20 Feb 2015
Accepted: 10 May 2015
Published online: 15 Mar 2016 *

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