Saturday, January 30, 2010

Menu Psychology: A Lyrical Approach

A recent New York Times article points out that “menu engineering” is extremely important to running a successful restaurant.

According to the article, restaurants dealing with the recession are “hoping that some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money.”

I guess that’s no surprise when you consider that the menu is probably the most valuable marketing communication tool for any restaurant—but just what are the best practices for creating a menu? And do those best practices translate to other industries?

Restaurant owners such as Danny Meyer definitely are on to something with respect to communicating price:

The price of Boodie’s chicken livers, for example, is $9, written simply as 9. This is a friendly and manageable number at a time when numbers really need to be friendly and manageable. Besides, it has no dollar sign. In the world of menu engineering and pricing, a dollar sign is pretty much the worst thing you can put on a menu, particularly at a high-end restaurant.

Research by Brian Wansink of Cornelll University seems to support this approach. Brian says that when the prices were printed with dollar signs, customers spent less than when presented with menus that had dollar signs—and that numerals work better than words:

Customers spent significantly more when the price was listed in numerals without dollar signs, as in “14.00” or “14,” than when it included the word “dollar,” as in “Fourteen dollars.” Apparently even the word “dollar” can trigger what is known as “the pain of paying.”

That does make me wonder: How do they handle menus in a place like Zimbabwe, where hyperinflation continues to devalue the currency? Is an appetizer at a Zimbabwean restaurant priced at “14,000,000,000”? Perhaps “14 billion”? Or just “14B”?

In any case, Danny Meyer compares the restaurant menu to a piece of music:

“The chefs write the music and the menu becomes the lyrics, and sometimes the music is gorgeous and it’s got the wrong lyrics and the lyrics can torpedo the music.”

I tend to agree. Maybe your menu doesn’t include food. Perhaps it features generous helpings of enterprise software, delicately prepared financial solutions, or even chips (the silicon kind).

Whatever your menu calls for, I’d be happy to create the lyrics that make your products sing.

Posted by Richard Bloch

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