You hear about restaurants promoting their food or packaged meals in Japan via QR Codes; you don’t quite hear it enough in the United States. There are a small but ever-growing number of brand marketers who are aggressively pushing this form of QR Code advertising. It is picking up because more people are beginning to open up to the idea by virtue of the fact that working a marketing campaign around QR Codes is financially feasible and prudent in such a weak economy.

A franchise business owner who runs and promotes a very casual Mexican restaurant chain launched its third outlet in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is one of the few who have jumped into the bandwagon. Peter Shipman believes that it’s important to use the right method to attract the right group of people. When trying to capture the young market, he knew he had to make it technological leap of faith. This restaurant owner advertised discount coupons on posters and newspapers around university and college campus and on these ads were QR Codes. Once scanned, these students can enjoy one free burrito for a burrito that he or she bought from the chain just by showing their QR Code coupon upon purchase.

It was interesting to note that the campaign received more or less four-thousand scans. This QR Code advertising campaign in inline with the core principle of the restaurant, which is to deliver fresh, unique and distinctive flavor to their customers. They believe that to there’s nothing different about a restaurant if every restaurant used the same recipe. Therefore, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that they’ve become one of the forerunners for QR Code technology in the restaurant industry.

There are more or less fifteen other programs running and they’re in the fashion, retail and beverage industries. In the footwear category, we have, of course, the Nike 6.0 whereby JagTag codes were used to deliver information about endorsing stars linked to their sports shoes. Microsoft, in the meantime, is integrating QR Code marketing for Xbox.

The only obstacle with the growth of QR Code marketing is the fact that most mobile phone users find it cumbersome or found it to be a bother to download a software into their mobile phones. Without the software, mobile phones would not be able to read and receive information from the QR Codes.

But all this could be a thing of the past because in the near future, new mobile phones models will come preloaded with scanning capabilities. The process could be a slow one, it’s still regarded in a positive light amongst many.