Why do customers decide to choose one dish over another when they see a menu?
Although there are several factors that influence the choice, one of the main ones is the way a dish is presented on the menu.
That’s where neuromarketing comes in. Neuromarketing allows you to direct customers’ attention to the products you are most interested in selling.
In this article I will reveal some tricks to consider when designing a menu.
Both touch and sight play an important role
The weight of the menu matters!
If customers are holding a menu of a certain weight, they will have the feeling of being in a more exclusive place. Be careful, it doesn’t have to be difficult to handle, just rigid enough to stand on its own when held.
The choice of a good font is also important.
There is no point in using a very elaborate one if it is not comfortably readable. Comic Sans might give a negative impression and come across as too informal.
For sweeter dishes, rounded fonts work best, while angular fonts are preferable for salty or sour dishes.
If you want to draw attention to a text, italic fonts are the solution.
An enticing menu requires attractive and descriptive names.
“Mixed salad” does not convey the same message as “bowl of garden tomatoes, tender asparagus, and flowers.” We can also be more creative and go further with names like “Molten chocolate dream” for a chocolate fondant.
Don’t be enigmatic though: customers always want to understand in advance what they will be eating.
Course descriptions can strongly direct customers’ choice.
Using words that stimulate the senses such as creamy, aromatic, colorful, and crunchy will direct customers to choose the product that appeals to them most.
Also, describing a brief history of the dishes could be very beneficial, as the emotional aspect will come into play, increasing interest and curiosity.
Colors in the menu
The important thing for a menu is the stylistic alignment to the restaurant and, therefore, colors become crucial.
Color has great unconscious evocative power, and associations are different depending on certain variables: gender, social group, historical context, etc.
Choosing the right color means creating a direct relationship with the unconscious.
Those who find the right color combination succeed in attracting the attention of the potential customer.
In the book Color: The Secret Influence, two scientists, the Fehrman brothers, theorized about the influence of color in marketing and selling products and services.
The scientists coined the term “weasel colors” to refer to those colors that subliminally succeed in influencing our choices:
- Red, yellow, brown, orange exert an effect on the nervous system by stimulating appetite. Yellow and orange increase the production of gastric juices and are particularly attractive, especially to gluttons. The golden color gives the food an appetizing appearance.
- Red/yellow vs. green/blue stimulate thirst by combining the sensations of dry and liquid (e.g. Fanta logo).
- Purple, gold, wine red express prestige and sophistication.
- Greenish purple evokes putrefaction and provokes disgust.
The Fehrman brothers did not stop there, indicating that in addition to sight, colors can stimulate:
The sense of smell:
- Orange evokes spicy sensations;
- Green, scents of herbs and spices;
- Purple, delicate and pleasant scents;
- Yellow, citrus sensations.
The sense of taste:
- Yellow and green evoke a sour taste;
- Orange and yellow, sweet sensations;
- Pink, delicate and sweet taste;
- Dark blue and purple and dark green, bitter taste;
- Grey/green or gray and blue, salty.
Thus, color is able to influence the consumer’s appetite by appealing to the senses. Interesting, don’t you think?
Prices
One mistake that is usually found on many restaurants’ menus is having the prices of dishes lined up in one column.
This leads the customer to quickly scan for the lowest prices and aim for those dishes, or at least to immediately exclude the more expensive ones.
Aligned prices simplify the work of comparison. In contrast, prices written at the end of the name require significant cognitive effort to make the comparison, which will therefore be done less frequently.
It is better to have the prices misaligned and in whole numbers without decimals, so that the customer can read them more quickly.
Forget the well-known trick of lowering the price by a penny to make it look cheaper; it activates the defense processes.
How to place dishes on the menu
If customers quickly find the dishes on the menu that they always ask for, they will have more time to explore the rest of the menu.
It is strategic, therefore, to make the most requested dishes highly visible and to place next to them the other dishes that you would like to sell.
Let’s say that in this way we can make the customer attracted to new flavors and change his usual purchasing decision.
In a previous article, I talked about how to position dishes to create an “energy-saving menu” if you are interested click here.
If you want to learn more about this topic, this article is an excerpt from my book “Neurofood: neuromarketing applied to the world of food and wine” published by Hoepli.
Any questions? Send me an email at mb@marcobaldocchi.com .
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