I’ve always advocated following industries and regions that are innovating in social media and mobile. Although it’s exciting to come up with “world first” ideas, sometimes it makes sense to take some inspiration from the leaders, especially when they’re doing amazing work.

One of the hot topics at Web In Travel Australia last week was how companies can adapt to the needs of the Asian market. Looking outside travel, Tesco has done an amazing job in South Korea by reinventing their brand as “Home Plus” and dominating online.

Instead of pushing an American brand into a marketplace to compete with an entrenched local player, Tesco took a step back, considered the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors and approached from another angle. Their research showed that Koreans were time poor, technology rich and hated the idea of taking time out to shop; something many of us can relate to.  Instead if accepting this fact as an inevitable weakness of the retail model, Home Plus used mobile technology to help their customers take advantage of time they would otherwise be forced to waste. Check out this video:

 
By placing pictures of shelves with real inventory in train stations and attaching QR codes to each item, Home Plus allows passengers in transit to do their grocery shopping. the digital purchases are charged to an account and the real world items are delivered to their homes after the customer. Using this unique approach, Home Plus has become number one in online sales and a close number two in retail (real world) sales.

You might be asking yourself why QR code purchases work in South Korea and haven’t taken off in Australia and other western regions. There are actually two reasons.

Mobile carriers in both Japan and Korea demanded that all mobiles ship with native QR code readers; meaning Korean consumers are conditioned to use QR codes as part of their mobile life. Second, the iPhone, which doesn’t ship with a native QR code reader and arguably led to the disinterest in QR codes in the west, wasn’t released in Korea until 2009. South Korean consumers are living in an environment where QR code marketing is not only viable, but the norm.

But what’s happening outside of western Asia?

According to research by 3GVision, the global usage of QR codes rises every month.

Top ten QR code usage from around the world:

In May, Australia became the tenth highest country for QR code usage (74% growth month on month, 195% over 3 months) and America held its spot in number one. If you thought QR code marketing had missed its window of opportunity, it seems you’d be mistaken.

With QR usage on the rise, we can expect some really fresh “in real life” applications coming soon. The real question is, how we get the average Joes to adopt something they know nothing about? Personally, I feel it will take courage from advertisers to take a leap of faith, and the foresight from developers to include QR code readers within apps would be great too. Really, why wait for Apple when we don’t have to?

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