Rating: UK Brewers sign up to promote their wares
Here’s a classic way of employing QR codes to promote a product. The UK beer site – YourRound, is offering a special premium account to its clients – the brewers. Included in the price is not only the generation of a unique QR code for each client, but the promise to link it to a special ‘mobile-aware’ page. That gets around the disappointment experienced by many cameraphone users who scan a QR code and find themselves looking at a standard HTML site. GoMo News was particularly impressed by YourRound’s imagination for suggested uses of QR codes. We’ve never heard of anyone placing a QR code on a pump clip before. And if you don’t know what a pump clip is, then you’re not a real ale or cider fan.Given that almost one in three UK adults now own a handset capable of recognising QR codes, YourRound has now created a mobile specific site for every brewer in its database.
This mobile site is a streamlined version of the brewer’s product page designed specifically with mobile browsing in mind.
YourRound suggests that the QR codes – which link to the special mobile page can be printed onto virtually anything. Indeed, a QR code can go on anything which normally would have carried the brewer’s address.
As well as putting them on pump clips, the site suggests printing them on flyers, beer mats, bar towels, staff T-shirts, pub quiz posters and even stationery.
Brewers don’t have to do anything other than continue adding their beers and ciders to the YourRound site for free and their mobile sites will be maintained automatically.
There is a cost for utilising the QR code/mobile web site facility and other Brewery Manager tools, however.
Brewers need to sign up for a premium account at £24.99 for six months or just under £50 per year. As the company says, “Where else could you pay so little for a fully functional mobile website?”
Here’s a puzzle, though. Why is the YourRound iPhone app free whereas Android users are expected to pay 69 pence?
That’s a first because normally it’s the iPhone users who are regarded as rich enough to pay up. What does YourRound know that the rest of the industry doesn’t, eh?
Find the iPhone app here and the Android app here. Brewers can sign up for YourRound here.
Here’s a couple of extra questions for your pub quizzes …
What’s a pump clip? A: the small sign that clips around the handle on a real ale/cider pump.
What’s the Belgian connexion in the accompanying picture? A: That’s a Magritte style picture in the poster.
GoMo News wonders how long other kinds of trade associations will take to notice that linking QR codes to mobile-aware web sites could prove lucrative?
