Quick Response (QR) codes are widely employed in promotional campaigns worldwide. Adding a QR code to an advertisement increases visual design complexity, yet there remains little research on its impact on consumers. Drawing upon relevant marketing and psychology theories, we address how curiosity, visual design complexity, and perceived fit jointly affect consumers’ QR codes scan intention. We hypothesize that highly curious consumers are likely to be more attracted to visually complex advertisements, thereby demonstrating greater scan intention. However, slightly curious consumers may feel overwhelmed by visual design complexity, but are likely to be more attracted to a good perceived fit between the QR code advertisement and the brand, which overcomes the negative effects of visual design complexity, leading to greater scan intention. The experimental findings support our main predictions. We conclude by discussing theoretical and managerial implications, recognizing important limitations, and suggesting future research directions.

Introduction

Quick Response (QR) codes are bi-dimensional, machine-readable optical labels that were developed in 1994 for fast and accurate inventory checks (Denso, 2011). Because of their high information encoding capacity, Japanese marketers and advertisers quickly embraced QR codes in a wide range of promotional activities (Dou & Li, 2008). QR codes rapidly gained popularity in Europe in the early 2000s, and soon after in North America, with manufacturers putting them on everything from wine labels to candy bars to shampoo bottles (Okazaki, Li, & Hirose, 2012). However, recent headlines in some trade journals claim that QR codes are already “dead” because of low consumer acceptance. For example, a comScore survey indicates that only 17% of US smartphone users scanned a QR code in 2011 (Pozin, 2012). Conversely, QR codes can be seen in many places in the marketplace, particularly in retail environments, service tickets, and many consumer products. Given this, some practitioners argue that the real measure of QR codes’ success does not lie in usage by general consumers, but in usage by specific groups of consumers targeted via such codes (Morris, 2015). Consumers are more likely to scan QR codes and redeem the benefits when the incentive to scan the code is specifically targeted and made attractive to their particular needs and desires (Okazaki et al., 2012). However, the literature offers little guidance as to the variables that contribute to consumers’ QR code scan intention.