The wine trade misses a trick

A - slightly edited - piece I wrote in May 2017 for Meininger's Wine Business International, a long time before the recent revival of interest in QR codes as a free tool that governments and organisations could use against Covid-19

“What you have is an answer looking for a question.” I remember hearing this expression from a successful inventor I met a long time ago. I had just described one of my own crazy notions and his polite response was liken it to a creation of his that he had failed to get off the ground. “There are lots of good ideas like that,” he said. “The trick is to find a commercial use that makes them as close to indispensable as possible.”

Sometimes, it’s a matter of time or geography. I fell in love with QR codes when I first encountered them around six years ago. For no cost at all, these black and white squares gave anybody with a smartphone instant access to a website without the hassle of typing in its address. Surely, I thought, this would be an ideal solution for wine producers struggling to cram information onto their back labels. My belief was backed up by the success of a couple of QR-code driven competitions – for a big Australian producer and Wines of Brazil – that I helped to initiate. But with a few high profile exceptions, most of the industry failed to see the appeal.

The problem, particularly in the US, was that few other sectors of business used QR codes, and the ones that did, such as airlines, treated them much as shops do traditional barcodes: as a technical device designed for their convenience rather than ours. 

That at least partly helps to explain the failure of QR codes to take off for wine. Producers that did try to exploit them made the mistake of simply printing the codes on their back labels without providing any incentive for anyone to scan them. Most people probably imagined that, like the barcodes alongside which they sat, they were a device to help workers and robots in warehouses and shops manage stock rotation and sales. The Australian and Brazilian initiatives worked because everyone who saw the QR code also saw an invitation to 'Scan to Win' a prize.

A few high profile European producers still remain faithful to the QR cause, supported by the fact that, in France and Germany, big corporations like McDonalds still think it’s worth exploiting the technology. Revealingly, the codes are usually associated with competitions and special offers. Getting online information more easily is apparently not an important enough question for most people to need answering.

In China, however, the main questions with which the codes are associated are ones that I’d guess concern 99% of the human race. First, there are relationships. When any of the 650m users of WeChat (or Weixin as most of them would know it) meet for the first time, they no longer have to write down each other’s phone numbers or emails, or exchange business cards, once the essential foreplay to even the briefest of encounters in China. All that is needed is for one user to scan the other’s code on their smartphone and the pair are instantly connected as efficiently as if they had agreed to befriend each other on Facebook or LinkedIn. Once the connection is made, the two people can use WeChat to call each other, send texts and images, invite each other to join online groups, and a lot more.

WeChat is now the way I communicate both with the tailor in Shanghai from whom I occasionally buy clothes, and the CEO of one of China’s biggest wine companies.

But there’s something else I can do with WeChat. Armed with a Chinese bank account, I could pay that tailor for my suit, simply by scanning his QR code. If I were a parent whose son or daughter was overseas in desperate need of some cash, I could send it to them instantly. If a group of friends go to a restaurant, the system does away with the hassle of splitting the bill. 

In Beijing and Shanghai, geo-located bicycles for rent can be found on almost any pavement. To unlock the brake, registered users simply scan the code and ride to their destination where scanning it again locks it in readiness for the next person. 

WeChat does not have the monopoly over the use of QR codes as a means of payment. Huge numbers of Chinese prefer to use Alipay, Alibaba’s alternative. Alibaba, for those who don’t recognise the name, is the Chinese giant that is rather like a combination of ebay and Amazon, and with profits larger than those two companies combined. It is also the company behind the $18bn deal-focused, ‘Singles Day’ retail bonanza that captivates China’s online shoppers on the eleventh of November every year. Needless to say, the ubiquitous posters promoting the day all feature QR codes – as do a large proportion of the other posters and print advertisements to be seen in China.

For all these reasons, it makes sense for anyone selling in China to use QR codes on their promotional material and back labels – provided they link to a site that is comprehensible to Chinese visitors.

Meanwhile, in the West, there are the stirrings of a QR code revival – by users of the Snapchat online platform. Most of the middle-aged wine professionals I know struggle to understand the appeal of Snapchat, so they will probably have similar difficulty caring how a QR code is the answer to a Snapchat user’s question. But it may be worth taking the effort to find out.

Robert Joseph