Late last year, we worked with Constellation Wines – perhaps best known for their Robert Mondavi and Svedka Vodka brands – on a holiday push that featured traditional and mobile marketing elements. The “Bundle Up And Save” campaign’s centerpiece – a free-standing insert distributed in newspapers nationwide – included both standard clippable coupons and invitations to scan a QR code or send an SMS text. Doing the latter took customers to a mobile site that offered tips on food / wine pairings and a social media component that allowed users to exchange notes and reviews.

The campaign began in November 2010 and ran through January 2011, with good results: thousands of consumers made their way to Constellation’s mobile site as a result. And in our analysis of this short-term project, we found something at once unexpected – and unsurprising: the majority of participants opted for scanning QR codes over SMS by a ratio of 7-to-1.
Why was that unexpected? Well, SMS texts have been around for almost as long as cell phones, with the first SMS marketing effort dating back to 2002 . SMS is instantaneous in its reach – capable of going out to millions of users at once. One study showed that 90% of all text messages sent are read within three minutes of delivery, and that 99% of all text messages are eventually read. With an estimated 80% of mobile users carrying around feature phones (i.e. not smartphones), SMS still has a far wider reach than QR codes do.

That being said, the past few years have seen the market flooded with smartphones. And although only about 50 million out of the more than 250 million wireless devices in the U.S. are smartphones, Apple has sold tens of millions of iPhones since 2008. Furthermore, phones running Android have reportedly outpaced Apple’s hugely popular device.

Can you judge the potential of QR by just one campaign’s results? Of course not. But with 2011 already declared a watershed year for m-marketing, it’s hard to ignore the impact of 2-D codes and its role in any great mobile marketing campaign.

Augme has written plenty about the need to employ comprehensive mobile campaigns as part of an overall marketing strategy. And the Constellation Wines campaign is a prime example of how that’s done: a balance of traditional calls-to-action (newspaper inserts, bottleneck hangers and case cards) blended with mobile marketing tools (QR codes, SMS, an interactive website).

But the overwhelming response to the QR code aspect of the Constellation campaign makes something crystal clear: aided by the rapid, widespread adaptation of smartphones, QR codes have taken root as a viable mobile marketing tool in the span of less than three years – something SMS took nearly a decade to accomplish.

Are QR codes the future of mobile marketing? At 7-to-1, that’s a good bet.