In this article you’ll find 10 psychological marketing and sales tricks applied to restaurants. If you came here looking for new restaurant ideas, don’t worry: at the end of the article we’ve left links to some highly innovative, out-of-the-ordinary types of restaurant that might work in your country or city.
The psychological tricks below were put together by Maggie Zhang at Business Insider, and I have to admit they’re simply brilliant, above all because they leave nothing to chance and guide the customer through every decision they make. Spectacular!
1. Don’t use the “$” or “€” sign in prices.
A number is just a number until we put a currency sign next to it. Restaurants that have been advised by marketing experts don’t usually put the currency sign on their menus, because it would immediately remind customers that they’re spending money. It may sound silly, but many studies confirm that customers spend less when the menu says €25 instead of 25.
2. Be subtle with numbers.
We all know how important it is to write 9.99 instead of 10, but… according to some experts, 9.99 signals value, not quality, so they recommend avoiding the best-known trick and swapping it for a “nicer” number, such as 9.95 or 9.90, which they consider more effective.
3. Use fully descriptive language.
Research by Cornell University found that dishes described more appealingly are more attractive and popular with customers, and that’s where consumption ends up 27% higher than for dishes without descriptions.
For example, writing “Camembert with pincheta sauce and rocheta cranberries” may prompt a very logical question along the lines of: “What the hell are Camembert, pincheta sauce and rocheta cranberries?”
Change it to something like “Camembert cheese with a sweet homemade sauce and cranberries with a creamy touch of smooth, creamy sauce.” That way we include the keyword “homemade” (people love homemade these days) and open up the sense of taste with the words “creamy” and “smooth.”
In short, names and descriptions with a few keywords get indexed better in our brain’s own Google.
4. Connect names with family.
Family sells, so names like “Potatoes made with Aunt Margarita’s recipe” or “Cranberries in homemade sauce, Grandma’s recipe” help sell thanks to that touch of nostalgia.
Note: never write “mother-in-law’s sauce recipe.”
5. Use ethnic names.
Using terms from ethnic cuisine can give your restaurant a very distinctive touch. It also makes the restaurant seem more professional and more international thanks to the geographical labels, and can lead the subconscious toward more exotic flavours and textures.
6. Make things stand out visually.
Remember that we humans are “simple” by default. If your menu is printed in black and you highlight certain words in green, sales of whatever is highlighted in green will automatically go up (even if it’s the pincheta sauce).
So make the most of visuals too. Your menu should have good-quality pictures, and a picture of a dish with an ethnic name or a suitably eye-catching description will certainly get amazing results.
7. Play with prices and sizes to lead customers where you want.
We’ve talked about this technique before: you can steer customers through comparisons of prices and sizes, because a product is only cheaper or more expensive depending on what you compare it with. So you can put very high prices on some dishes, to the point of being genuinely expensive (€115), and further down dishes at €45 or €25, which customers will see as a bargain compared with the prices above, when in fact paying €25 for that dish would be expensive, especially compared with dishes at €8.95. These are called menu decoys.
Remember our article “How your mind betrays you“? Here we’ll do the same thing, but with different sizes as well. This technique is called “the bracket”: we offer two portion sizes at different prices. As a rule, customers will go for the cheaper portion, even without knowing how big it really is. And certainly without knowing that this is the portion the restaurant actually wanted to sell you, not the large one: once again, the high price is used as a decoy so that the low price looks like a bargain.
8. Atmosphere encourages spending.
Just as shops use 11 tricks to make you spend more money, and one of them is music, various studies have shown that classical music, jazz or a piano in the background make people feel richer and classier, and therefore more inclined to spend money, and certainly more motivated to come back another day.
Meanwhile, the customers of restaurants that don’t make sure they have distinctive background music tend to come back less often and spend somewhat less.
9. The reading pattern.
Just as shops place the products with the biggest margins at the entrance (when the trolley is still empty), restaurants should follow how customers’ eyes move when they look at the menu. Studies show that people tend to pay most attention to the top right of the menu, so that’s probably where you should put your most profitable dishes (the ones you, as a restaurant, most want to sell).
10. Be clear about what a restaurant sells.
Most owners aren’t clear about what they sell in their restaurant. You don’t sell food, drinks or set menus… you sell an experience, because customers will decide to come back if the experience was a pleasant one. And yes, the taste of the food is part of the experience.
That’s why many restaurants now turn to stand-up comedy or jokes to liven up the evening. The idea is to make customers want to come back, so that they associate you with a good moment in their lives in which they feel their money was well spent.
Also read: Mistakes to avoid in bars and restaurants, by Jon Taffer.
And as promised at the start, here are some original restaurant ideas:
- The 9 most original restaurants
- 5 innovative and original restaurant ideas
- The main mistake small business owners keep making
Featured image: Steven Miller, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
