If you eating out with your friend, most likely you will choose a type of restaurant that you should’ve already know what you are going eat, maybe a cheese burger, maybe a spaghetti carbonara, or maybe, a sirloin steak. But do you have a tendency to spend more money in some specific restaurants that provide the exact same food with others? Or how do you rate the quality of a restaurant? And have you ever ordered something that you didn’t planned to eat?
The MENU
Today, I’m going to talk about one of the key success factor of a restaurant – The MENU. As a second touch-point with the customers after the greeting, almost every menu have a magical role that highly influence on customers’ different psychological aspects included their attention, sensation, attitude, or perception which directly lead to their choices (decision making). Recently, I’ve read an article about how a menu can use different psychological tricks to affect our decision (Gray, 2017) which is so interesting that I have further discover more on how a menu can nudge our choices, change customers’ attitude, and improve the experiences in a restaurant. While most of the researches have investigated on how a specific (multi) sensory in a menu can form customer’s perception and influence on the perceived value and sales. Here are some highlighted findings.
The perceived quality
Interestingly, Magnini & Kim (2016) found that the physical weight of a menu is significantly associated with the customers’ perception of a restaurant scale and the service quality. Basically, with a controlled condition, a heavier menu [570g] allow customers to perceive the restaurant as more upscale and more capable to delivering higher levels of service quality. Moreover, based on the fundamental concept of “Colour psychology” (Elliot & Maier, 2014), above study also found that by using a gold menu background colour, customer will perceive the restaurants as being more upscale than using a white background. Where the implication is that by just adding the physical weight of a menu or changing the background colour, customer should be more willing to pay a relatively higher price because of a greater perceived value on the restaurant.
Source: Once
Descriptive labels
As for your choices of meal, the use of descriptive labels on a menu took an extremely important role to nudge customer’s behaviour and their post-consumption attitude. Wansink, Painter, & Van Ittersum (2001) suggested 4 types of menu labelling themes that can influence customers’ expectation regarding to the quality and feeling of the food written on the menu. By using a moderated description, the function of these 4 themes are trying to arouse customer’s emotion and feeling rather than providing a concreted information on their rational perspective. Themes included [1] Geographic Labels, by associating the food with geographic areas that have proven successful and positively well known (e.g. Scotch whiskey, Japanese ramen, English fish & chips). [2] Affective Labels, by simply adding emotional description of the food to trigger customers’ hedonic feeling. [3] Sensory labels, using verbal description to simulate the taste, smell, and the “mouth feeling” of the food can give customer a nice post-experience which will guide their decision (e.g. Crispy pock belly, Moist chocolate cake, Roast Beef). [4] Brand Labels, if the recipe or ingredients involves other famous brands, the notion of that brand could positively associated with customer previous experience and make your menu more attractive (e.g. Bacardi silver mojito).
In conclusion, different studies have given the idea that “Menu engineering” carry a great influence on customer’s decision making and eating experience in the way of affective processing. However, the key is to design an appropriate and coherent message in the menu that match your restaurant positioning.
References
Elliot, A. J., & Maier, M. A. (2014). Color psychology: Effects of perceiving color on psychological functioning in humans. Annual review of psychology, 65, 95-120.
Gray R. (2017). The secret tricks hidden inside restaurant menus. BBC See from [http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20171120-the-secret-tricks-hidden-inside-restaurant-menus?ocid=ww.social.link.facebook.]
Magnini, V. P., & Kim, S. (2016). The influences of restaurant menu font style, background color, and physical weight on consumers’ perceptions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 53, 42-48.
Wansink, B., Painter, J., & Van Ittersum, K. (2001). Descriptive menu labels’ effect on sales. The Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 42(6), 68-72.
Consumer Insights 
Hi!
This was a really interesting blog.
I had a look at what else could influence a customers’ decisions in a restaurant setting.
Research has found that the server’s themselves have a lot to do with customer satisfaction and therefore whether their decisions are positive or negative. If a server was appropriately dressed, for example neat and smart, as well as if they had good knowledge about the menu, customers were more satisfied with their experience at the restaurant (Saad Andaleeb & Conway, 2006). This would then influence the customers’ desire to return to the business, and even tell their friends and family about it which would then benefit the company.
References
Saad Andaleeb, S., & Conway, C. (2006). Customer satisfaction in the restaurant industry: an examination of the transaction-specific model. Journal of services marketing, 20(1), 3-11.
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This is a really nice post and an enjoyable read. One thing that some consumers do (or as my dad says, ‘read the menu, not the prices’) is just look at the prices of menus to make a choice. One common technique that restaurants do is having a separate dessert menu to the main menu (appetisers and main meals) as most dessert would cost significantly less than. If individuals were inclined to look at solely the prices of the menu then this may have a negative effect on the way that individuals perceive the restaurant.
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It is a nice blog on consumer choice and decision making. I have recently read an article on how consumer satiety can be improved through the plate in which they were served. The researchers served yogurt in a light weight plate and heavy weight plate. The difference between these two plates are 70 grams which is found to be below the noticeable difference. Participants who took yogurt from heavy plate reported that the yogurt is dense and it satiated more compared to the lighter ones. This phenomenon is called as “Sensation Transference”.
Reference:
Piqueras-Fiszman, B. and Spence, C. (2012). The weight of the container influences expected satiety, perceived density, and subsequent expected fullness. Appetite, 58(2), pp.559-562.
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