McDonalds Japan uses a lot of QR-code technology as marketing tool. In a purchase of drink and snack, I could find 4 codes on the placemat and the potato bacon pie package.

I particularly like the code on the pie package, which leads you to McDonald’s nutrition site. The interaction flow is like this:

• A customer purchases a pie and happily sits down to enjoy it.
• Being a health conscious individual, the customer is quite concerned about how much nutrition and calories the pie has.
• The customer pulls out his/her mobile phone, snaps the code and immediately sees the nutrition information about the pie in great detail. After knowing that the calories in this pie doesn’t exceed the daily limit, he/she feels save and happy to enjoy it without hesitation. Yum!

My thoughts:

Nutrition Campaign — McDonald’s can run a campaign to promote health conscious living, by creating free mobile app that let you scan food and automatically calculate the daily total calories consumption. The app is just a very simple QR-code scanner, which would recognize the code of the food you are eating (and also allow manual editing), and then automatically pull from the database the calories and nutrition values such as sodium, iron, fat and so on, and present a table of individual items as well as the daily total. It can also remember the data of previous days to generate historical charts.

Since most people perceive McDonalds as an unhealthy fast food restaurant, I think it would be nice for them to run such campaign to improve their public image and help marketing.

Testing Japanese Mobile Websites — tips to test mobile sites for Japanese mobile phone from desktop browser:

• Change your browser’s user agent to one of the listed agent on Docomo‘s spec page:
  http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/service/imode/make/content/spec/useragent/
• For this test, I just randomly picked this user agent with support of Browser 2.0:
  "DoCoMo/2.0 F04B(c500;TB;W30H25) (Communicating from the browser(vertical full screen))"
• Turn on Safari “Develop” option to enable custom user agent.
• Change the Text-encoding to “Japanese (Shift JIS)” if your browser is not already defaulted to Japanese encoding.

More photos:

Related posts:

1. QR-Code Marketing
2. Grocery Shopping in Subway Station with QR-code
3. QR-code Chocolate Business Card and Decocho.com
4. Mobile Billboard Truck and QR-code
5. QR-code Use by Real Estate Agency

About Calvin C

Hello there, I’m Calvin Chun-yu Chan. Grew up in Hong Kong, studied and worked in Canada as web engineer+designer, now designing mobile apps in Tokyo. On my blog I would like to share my opinions on design, usability, culture and creativity. Follow me on: Twitter @calvincchan Google+ Profile

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