Restaurant Menu Lessons

http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/articles/fancy-fonts.htm

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.

In If It’s Hard to Read, It’s Hard to Do – Processing Fluency Affects Effort Prediction and Motivation, Song and Schwarz presented test subjects with a description of a menu item printed in either a simple font and a more hard to read font. The subjects who saw the difficult font rated the skills needed by the chef significantly higher than the subjects who saw the simple font.

These findings suggest that a restaurant wanting to justify higher prices could print the menu descriptions in a font which is harder to read. In addition, other steps that affect the cognitive fluency characteristics of the description could amplify the effect of the fancy font. Long descriptions with big words will also slow down the reader and imply that more effort and skill is needed to prepare the dish. The menu snippet in the illustration exploits several of these characteristics, employing mixed fonts and and unusually long descriptive text.

Of course, it is logical that the content itself should also suggest the skill and time needed to prepare the dish. As with most marketing efforts, best results occur when all the elements are in sync. Other steps to use a restaurant’s menu to boost sales are described in Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology.

Typography and Motivation

A Recipe for Motivation
By Wray Herbert. Originally published October 10, 2008
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/were-only-human/a-recipe-for-motivation.html

Is it possible that the simplicity (or complexity) of how a task is described and processed—its fluid or difficult “feel”—actually affects our attitude toward the task itself, and ultimately our willingness to put our heads down and work?

Two University of Michigan psychologists decided to investigate this idea in their lab. Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz wanted to see if they could motivate a group of 20-year-old college students to exercise regularly—not an easy task. They gave all the students written instructions for a regular exercise routine, but they used a simple but ingenious method to make the how-to instructions either cognitively palatable or challenging: Some got instructions printed in Arial typeface, a plain font designed for easy reading. Others got their instructions printed in a Brush font, which basically looks like it’s been written by hand with a Japanese paintbrush; it’s unfamiliar and much harder to read.

There are a lot of ways to make something mentally palatable, or not. You can used clear and simple language, or arcane vocabulary words; simple sentences or convoluted sentences with lots of clauses. The psychologists chose typeface because it’s easy to manipulate in the lab. After the students had all read the instructions, they asked them some questions about the exercise regimen: how long they thought it would take, whether it would flow naturally or drag on endlessly, whether it would be boring, and so forth. They also queried them on whether they were likely to make exercise a routine part of their day.

The findings were remarkable. Those who had read the exercise instructions in an unadorned, accessible typeface were much more open to the prospect of exercising: They believed that the regimen would take less time and that it would feel more “fluid” and easy. Most important, they were more willing to make exercise part of their day. Apparently, the students’ brains mistook the ease of reading about exercise for ease of actually doing the pushups and crunches, and this misunderstanding motivated them to actually think about a life change. Those who struggled through the Japanese brushstrokes had no intention of heading to the gym; the reading alone tired them out.

Song and Schwarz decided to double-check these results with another experiment, this one involving a completely unrelated activity: cooking. Again they used easy- and hard-to-read typefaces, but in this case the instructions were a recipe for making a Japanese sushi roll. After they had read the recipe, the volunteers estimated how long it would take them to make the dish, and whether they were inclined to do it. They were also asked how much skill a professional cook would need to prepare the sushi roll.

The results were basically the same as before. As reported in the October issue of the journal Psychological Science, those who read the cooking instructions in the mentally challenging script saw the task as time-consuming and requiring a high level of culinary skill; they weren’t apt to try it themselves. They in effect used the alien writing as a proxy for the actual task, and as a result ended up avoiding it. Those with the more digestible instructions were much likely to sharpen their knives and head for the kitchen.

Our brains employ all sorts of tricks and shortcuts to get us through the day, but it’s good to be wary of these automatic judgments. If unchecked, our tendency to confuse thoughts and actions can make dubious choices seem easier and more desirable than they ought to be, or they can discourage us from healthy habits and creative exploration. After all, most of the time using a “self-operating” napkin is just as simple as it appears to be.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, please visit the “We’re Only Human” weblog or listen to podcasts at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman. Selections also appear in the magazine Scientific American Mind and at http://www.sciam.com.

(Further Reading)

• If It’s Hard to Read, It’s Hard to Do: Processing Fluency Affects Effort Prediction and Motivation. Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz in Psychological Science, Vol. 19, No. 10, pages 986-988; October 2008. Download the PDF of the study

I’ll Have That Typeface on the Menu

A new study suggests that ultra-fancy and hard-to-read type convinces diners that the dishes are worth the high prices.

Article from Time.com. By Jeremy Caplan Thursday, Jun. 12, 2008

It’s no secret that the cost of a restaurant dish tends to mirror its complexity. That’s why a menu item that says “medley of berry conserves and pureed pindas ” is likely to cost five times what it would if it were just called peanut butter and jelly. But it turns out that obscure menu terminology may be just half the game. A new study suggests that typography also plays a role in influencing diners.

In a paper that will appear in the October issue of Psychological Science, Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz suggest that small changes in menu fonts can significantly alter people’s perceptions of dishes’ complexity and value.

“People infer that if something on a menu is difficult to understand or hard to read that it takes great skill and effort to prepare,” says Song, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan. “When I go to an expensive French restaurant, I can hardly pronounce the words on the menu, so I take for granted that it’s expensive because it’s not comprehensible.”

Similarly, Song says, using an offbeat typeface to obscure a dish’s description may signal hidden value to an unsuspecting diner on unfamiliar ground. That may explain the implicit logic employed by restaurants offering exorbitant entrees described with elaborately scripted fonts in microscopic print.

“My father carries a flashlight and has been known to set napkins on fire trying to read the words on his menu,” says Richard Foss, a California restaurant critic who has launched a service called Menu Repairmen. Foss cites Elizabethan fonts and old-German typefaces as egregious examples of hard-to-read styles used by pubs to signal authenticity.

Minuscule menu print has become so commonplace that some restaurants, such as Eleven Madison Park and the Union Square Cafe in New York City, offer reading glasses for guests who need them, in the same way other restaurants offer dinner jackets. They do so not because their menus are poorly designed, which they are not, but because some guests, particularly those with declining vision, have grown accustomed to using reading glasses in dim light for menus with fine print. In Baltimore, an eye-care firm launched a program called MenuMates providing upscale area restaurants four pairs of reading glasses in a wooden recipe box.

To conduct one of her experiments, Song compared the responses of subjects exposed to menu descriptions typed in a simple Arial font with responses from those exposed to identical dish descriptions in a harder-to-read Mistral font. Subjects in the latter group were more likely to conclude that the dish was hard to prepare and required great skill.

Rather than looking at menus from around the country, the researchers created their own examples of easy and hard-to-read type and analyzed subjects’ responses. The experiment was limited in its sample size, and the researchers focused primarily on the psychological effects that lead people to draw conclusions based on font style and presentation. Song says that based on her findings, she might recommend that if restaurant owners want to give consumers the impression that their food is complex and of special value, they should consider styling their menus accordingly.

Not everyone agrees with that point of view. “Using fancy fonts and small print may suggest that you’re sophisticated, fancy and highbrow, but also pretentious and unapproachable,” says Aaron Allen, founder and CEO of the Quantified Marketing Group, a restaurant design and marketing company based in Orlando, Florida. Allen says he recently boosted a barbecue restaurant’s sales 17% recently just by making its menu typography more readable, not less.

Allen recommends using sans-serif fonts and few capital letters. He instructs managers to draw diners’ eyes to the most profitable items on a three-panel menu by positioning those golden dishes in three key places: the center of the middle page and the top-right and top-left corners, which he calls the sweet spots. In addition to avoiding bad translations, Allen says chefs should use simple language when possible.

Anne Burrell, star of the new Food Network show Secrets of a Restaurant Chef, says she’s likewise wary of intentionally abstruse menu language. “I find that the more intricate a menu description is, the more disappointing a dish usually is,” says Burrell, Mario Batali’s longtime sous chef on Iron Chef America. Burrell takes the same low-key approach to typography and design. At Centro Vinoteca, the New York City restaurant where she is executive chef, Burrell uses all lowercase letters in a basic Garamond font. “I prefer to underpromise and overdeliver.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1813950,00.html#ixzz11brwNEln