Date: 3 January 2014
Location: London Bridge, London
Campaign: Evans Cycles Window Display

I’m a sucker for bike gear and an even bigger sucker for a Sale, so this display in the window of Evans Cycles’ London bridge branch caught my eye this morning as I crossed the road from the train station to catch the 149 to Shoreditch High Street as part of my morning commute.

QR codes are now so ubiquitous that you would imagine most people with a smartphone know what they are and how to use them, and a window display seems to me like a perfect deployment for the tech.
The code was linked to a message about saving money on a new bike via the Ride2Work scheme, but with another big poster in the adjacent window advertising a ‘Big Brand Sale’, I assumed the QR code would deliver details about all, or at least selected, items in the sale, not just the Ride2Work stuff, when it was scanned.

In fact, scanning the code simply took me to the homepage of Evans’ mobile-optimised site, with no specific shout-out reference to the Big Brand Sale or to the Ride2Work scheme.

The second link on the homepage is, in fact, ‘Ride to Work’ (sic), but it looks as if this is just the way the mobile site homepage is. To check this out, I googled ‘Evans Cycles’ and clicked through from the search result. Here the plot thickens slightly, as the regular mobile site homepage features a 5-image carousel shouting about the savings available on various items – ‘Up to 37% off road bikes’; ‘Up to 50% off shoes’; Up to 40% off jackets’ – with a ‘Go’ link on each slide taking you through to a page of product listings for the item in question, showing the savings available on each model.

It’s appealing and eye-catching in a way that the page the QR code takes you through to simply isn’t. Which begs the question, why does the QR code link through to a non-descript page when a much more exciting page already exists on the company’s mobile site.

10 out of 10 for the idea then, but only a 5 for the execution.