QR Enabled M&S Orange and Mango Juice

Here is Sophie’s Orange and Mango Juice from M&S. It was bought this morning in Brighton.

Looks nice doesn’t it? Then I noticed…

Flip the bottle round and sure enough…

The I remembered I had a QR app on the iPhone so I thought I’d give it a shot. First of all it fetches a URL as you’d expect.

I don’t know about you but the URL http://www.mands.mobi looks really horrible and alien. It took me a few scans to realise that it’s totally legit.

Like me you are probably very very excited about what the Orange and Mango Juice page looks like. Well here you go…

It’s got info about the product. Cool. It’s got an offer. Cool. And there’s a bunch of ‘stuff’ too. I was a bit bothered by the fact that the info wasn’t about the actual product, it was just about generic Orange Juice. But maybe I’m being unfair and anal.

Some of the pages aren’t great – they feel like someone has just dumped some text on a page without very much care and attention. Again the anal me has a problem with the fact that the bullet points aren’t even proper bullet points. It smacks of ‘copy and paste’ to me.

And of course, things like Joke of the Day were never going to be much more than Christmas Cracker fodder…

Overall I was really at a bit of a loss to know what to think.

It’s not bad. I’m glad that M&S are playing with this stuff. And I quite like the fact that they’ve not over-cooked it. It feels like an appropriate level of content for a bottle of juice. Although the fact that it was just for generic Orange juice still bugs me a bit. And it could have been better designed. And the copy could have been more interesting. And ‘joke of the day’ is a bit, meh.

Sophie made a good point. She said that she wouldn’t bother going back after seeing what was on there. And I guess that’s the real point isn’t it? If peoples’ impressions of this QR stuff is that it’s a waste of time, it’s going to be that much harder to get them to do it again. Not just for juice, but for any kind of product.

So on the one hand Marks and Spencer are opening the door for mainstream QR usage, which is great. I just hope that in the same gesture they’re not slamming it shut for us too.