Kraft Foods, the $19 billion consumer goods company, has been trying to understand the relative consumer-reach powers of NFC and QR codes to see if either is going to resonate more with mobile shoppers. Its answer: Run shelf tests at five San Francisco-area grocery stories showing both NFC and QR to consumers and see what happens.
As the owner of brands Kraft, Maxwell House, Oscar Mayer, Nabisco, Planters and JELL-O discovered, NFC was the winner. NFC's engagement level was a dozen times greater than QR codes, and engagement time was 48 seconds for NFC compared with 5–10 seconds for QR. But NFC excludes many older phones and—crucially—all Apple iPhones and iPads. For many reasons, that's a dangerous segment to ignore.
