restaurants

Each of us has our own favourite stores; we all have those restaurants that we keep going back to. Some restaurateurs and retailers have managed to cultivate our loyalty and we love going to them. We tell our friends about them, we “like” them on Facebook, we gather groups to go to their stores with us.

What do cameras and sandwiches have in common? A lot, Jonathan Kaplan hopes. The creator of Flip Video, the super-simple camcorder device that provided a lot of the initial fuel behind YouTube’s early growth, has gotten a lot of press lately about his latest aspiration: The Melt, a nationwide chain of restaurants offering gourmet variations of grilled cheese sandwiches.

The new laws popping up which require restaurants to post calorie counts next to food listings have me concerned. This may come as a surprise to those who know me – after all, I am a fitness enthusiast and I try to practice healthy eating. So the nutritional content of food is really important to me.

Now that you followed my advice in Convince With Simple Fonts and eliminated complicated fonts from your websites and printed material, I’m going to tell you that there is one situation where fancy, hard to read fonts can actually work better than simple ones. If you are selling a costly product, describing it using a hard to read font will suggest to the viewer that more effort went into creating that product. As part of their ongoing cognitive fluency research, Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz of the University of Michigan found that restaurant menus are one such case.

My last Neuromarketing post, Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology, talked about various things restaurant menu engineers do to maximize sales and profits. I think it’s worth calling special attention to one aspect touched on in that post: how price presentation affects sales. Not, the price itself, which of course is very important, but the way the price is displayed to the diner.

Restaurants are great test labs for testing neuromarketing techniques. It’s easy to change offerings, menus, and pricing, and one gets immediate feedback on what’s working and what’s not. One technique I’ve written about from a product standpoint but which is also used by restaurants is decoy pricing.

by: John Caddell