By Tobias Foster, Contributor
The best restaurants understand the psychology of their customers and use neuromarketing tricks to make more sales and maximize profit margins.
One important task is creating a restaurant menu that will successfully attract guests and also generate a healthy profit. The trick that restaurants use in creating their menu is called the “psychology of choice.” Restaurants spend a lot of resources on creating menus, so it has to be successful. As a matter of fact, a successful menu equals a successful restaurant. So they play the trick of the psychology of choice on their customer to boost the success of their menu.
How Psychology of Choice Works
The psychology of choice involves all the biases that shape the human decision. In order to save time on making a decision, people will often choose to guess or function intuitively instead of being rational. Neuromarketing helps marketers (in this case, restaurants) identify consistent loopholes and short cuts in people’s decision-making processes and then appeal to these shortcuts when they present or market their products.
Many neuromarketing tricks are employed by restaurants – especially the biggest ones – to persuade the customers into requesting or ordering for certain types of dishes. These dishes are usually the ones that have very-high margins, such as non-alcoholic beverage programs.
8 Powerful Neuromarketing Tips to Boost Your Restaurant Business
Change the Restaurant’s Menu Structure
Studies have revealed that most diners tend to order items that are at the beginning of the menu list. This is something every restaurant should use to their advantage. Change the structure of your menu and put your biggest profit margin items near or at the top.
Arranging your menu order will reduce the visibility of other dishes with a low margin and get eyes on your best profit makers. Remember that only 109 seconds are spent on the menu, so guests might not even look far down to those dishes with low margins. This means the dishes at the top are more likely to be ordered.
To maximize this further, use what is known as the “serial position effect.” Put the lowest margin dishes very far down the menu or at the back.
Add Some Weight to Your Restaurant’s Menu
This might appear inconsequential to you, but it actually is important. Make sure your menu has some weight to it. When customers handle your menu, they should know that they are handling something tangible. The added weight of a menu gives guests a feeling that they are in an exclusive establishment and what they’re holding is important.
Compare this to just offering guests the menu of a sheet of paper. That appears weightless and worthless, and it would define your restaurant before the customer’s eyes.
However, you should also be careful to not have your customers weight-lifting each time they hold your menu. Make the menu weighty and stiff, so, it can hold itself in their hand but not overly heavy.
Choose the Right Fonts
Using the right fonts for your restaurant menu is important too. It should not be an elaborate or creative font that is difficult to read. Rather, it should be a simple and legible font that every one of your customers can see and read.
It should also be one that instills confidence and security in your customers. You can use cursive fonts to draw attention to a text. Use angular fonts for tart dishes and rounded fonts for sweeter dishes. The psychology of font use can really make or break the success of a restaurant’s menu.
Paint a Picture with Your Food & Drink Descriptions
According to research, adding the names of relatives such as grandmother, mother, etc. to dishes makes the meal more attractive. This bias is similar to a metaphor effect that makes us understand and remember easily the languages that appeal to our imagination. That is why many restaurants today give their dishes names like “Mother’s homemade sausage pie.”
There are some adjectives that are used liberally -- such as fresh farm eggs, country ham, etc. -- to make more sense menu descriptions. While these are fine buzzwords, restaurants should really look to add words that are capable of stimulating the senses such as aromatic, creamy, crunchy, colorful, etc. Try to find ways of engaging all five senses with your menu descriptions.
Leave Off the Dollar Sign
This is a more recent trend by restaurants, and it is basically taking advantage of cognitive bias in people’s decision-making processes.
Removing the currency symbol before a price and rounding the price up makes it easier for people to pay off. Instead of writing $23.65, just write 24. The number 24 is less associated with money and it makes it easier to pay a higher price without the guilt or anxiety.
Paradox of Choice
This is another decision-making shortcut you can capitalize on. When people have too many choices, it increases their anxiety and can cause guests to go for the less satisfactory ones. But they are more likely to make satisfactory choices when presented with fewer number of options.
So, it may be easier to persuade the customer to opt for a dish with high margins if you use a targeted menu, with lesser options.
Take Advantage of Visual Attention
People have different visual attention. One study using eye-tracking technology showed that people have a very short span of visual attention.
Specifically, folks from Western Europe and North America are known to focus on the center and top left part of the page. A scanning pattern was also identified and it was named “golden triangle.” The eyes of the reader are focused on the center of the menu, then the top right and the top left part. With this knowledge, you should structure your menu accordingly to put your best profit items in these visual hot spots.
Conclusion
If you are a restaurant owner or marketer, then these neuromarketing tricks should be important to you. You can use it to turn customer decisions in your favor. Who would have thought that restaurants could sway their guests into buying a particular dish by simply handing over the menu to them, without even saying anything to them verbally? That is how powerful neuromarketing is. So, if you run a restaurant and you have not been using these tricks, then you are losing out on what should be more gain for you.
So, give your restaurant’s menu a lookover and restructure it. This time put the psychology of choice that affects many humans into play, take advantage of their cognitive biases and loopholes in their decision-making processes, and make more profits for yourself.
Author’s Bio
Tobias Foster is a journalist and editor at custom essay service where they provide essay writing help. He is ambitious and has more than 5 years of experience with finance assignment help. His passion is business, philosophy, and marketing and he has a wealth of knowledge in those fields. He is a master of his craft.
