Mobile Tagging in German Magazines: A One-Year Study of QR Code Usage in Top-Selling Mass Market Publications

In the last decade, media consumption has shifted from traditional printed publications towards online media. This is why publishing companies are forced to develop innovative cross- and multi-channel strategies to protect revenues and to prevent further customer churn. Such strategies can be implemented on the basis of mobile tagging. Mobile tags such as QR codes have been used in German mass market publications for quite some time. Although the general usage and user acceptance of mobile tagging has already been subject to research, studies are still lacking on company use of mobile tags in mass market publications. Against this background, this paper presents a longitudinal study on the application of QR code technology in the 2012 issues of ten top-selling German popular magazines. The results of the study indicate that company usage of QR codes increased by 140 percent in 2012. The application of QR codes is dominated by commercial purposes such as advertisements. Editorial usage is mostly limited to popular news magazines but seems to have an impact on the usage intensity of commercial tagging. Best practices for QR codes integration, such as the usage of deep links, were observed for the majority of the analysed case studies. On the other hand, the study has revealed room for improvement.