The elements of marketing focus on the power of suggestion, sublime messages, and manipulation. As a result, we have publicity designs that are excellent combinations of psychology and marketing. Most of the designs include these elements. They make you feel a certain way and inspire you to take action.
Many of the restaurants employ this strategy in their menu designs. They’re constantly looking for ways to influence your decision-making. As a result, you end up buying their products or services. A restaurant business is no different. The restaurant industry has come up with some brilliant strategies. They’re quite useful while designing their menu. The term ‘menu engineering’ describes this entire process.
It involves study of verbal and visual psychology. These are the elements that come into play when people order food. All this information proves useful while designing the menus. The results of the study play an important role in maximizing the profits of the restaurant. Now, let’s see how a restaurant’s menu design entices you to order more of your desired food.
A strong first impression
A restaurant menu has a limited amount of time to influence the customer’s decision-making process. You can understand this from the fact that diners don’t read the menu in detail. They just scan through it quickly and decide what to order. Taking this into consideration, some restaurants create menus that are easier to scan. They do this with the use of clear section headings and titles of dishes that are easy to find.
The restaurants also use a combination of several other visual techniques. The menu engineers focus more on identifying the parts of a restaurant menu that are the most valuable. These are the parts that create that essential first impression. Customers spend most of their time looking at the first and the last items. That’s where the menu engineers must place the best-selling dishes.
Analyzing your pattern of reading
There’s a term used in restaurant menu design called the ‘sweet spot’. This is usually on the upper right-hand corner of the menu. When the customers begin scanning the menu, their eyes tend to gravitate towards this particular place. Many restaurants place the best-selling menu item here for this reason. So, you’ll usually find some high-priced seafood on the upper right-hand corner.
Highlighting it with an attractive illustration catches the attention of the diner instantly. A photograph of the food item generally doesn’t help. The use of bold typography is another great tactic to draw customers’ attention towards the sweet spot.
The use of color
All of us know how important color is in our lives. The theory of color finds application to a great extent in product packaging and advertising. This is because people often respond subconsciously to color in a rather emotional way. Restaurants also use color to emphasize certain items on the menu. There is a belief among them that the red and blue colors generally raise the craving for food in customers.
Attracting customers with photos
The high-end restaurants mostly avoid the practice of pairing photos with every dish on the menu. It’s the low-end or cheaper restaurants that create such menus. The decision to pair photos with every dish would depend upon the owner and type of restaurant. Applebee’s is a restaurant chain most of the Americans will be familiar with. They use one photo for every category and make use of brackets for highlighting certain dishes.