Understanding the Dough-mino Effect

How restaurants use psychology to market their products to you

You sit back with your phone in your hands, scouring through the pictures of well-plated dishes against the blurry background of well-upholstered furniture and well-patterned walls. You check the menus and carefully and compare prices. You pick a restaurant.

Oh no, no you don’t. The restaurant picks you. It is for a media literate person to know that the lifestyle we enjoy or yearn to enjoy has been sold to us keeping in mind our precise demographic and predicted tastes. Psychological tactics are rampantly employed by restaurants to maximise their profit and your perceived satisfaction.

Howard Maskowitz once said – “The mind knows not what the tongue wants.” This very notion is what gives the restaurants power to mould your tastes with the same dexterity they use to mould their dough.

When we go out to eat in a restaurant, everything in our surrounding has been designed specifically to ensure a profit. To begin with, the music is chosen in a way that promotes spending. Classical music is associated found to be with affluence and hence is played in restaurants. Classical music leads to higher spending than pop music or no music (North, Shilcock & Hargreaves, 2003).

Restaurants are also found to link colour with appetite. The colour blue induces a calm state and is hence used by restaurants to increase the likelihood that customers will spend more time there and therefore eat more and spend more money. That being said, excessive use of the colour blue can be an appetite suppressant (Kido, 2000) and is used in restaurant formats that benefit from that like all-you-can-eat or buffets. Research on colour and moods suggests that the colour red stimulates appetite since it has an effect on your metabolism (Kido, 2000) and the colour yellow draws your attention. This is why multiple food chains employ these colours in their logos (Case in point: McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Denny’s).
 
Restaurant menus work under the psychological theory of ‘paradox of choice’ which states that if given a lot of options, customers usually default back to something that they are used to. Going back to a familiar example - our college canteen - how many times have you come across people constantly confused about what to eat? This is an embodiment of what Barry Schwartz tells us.

As a result, menus are designed in such a way that limits your choices enabling you to try something new, possibly something more expensive (Schwartz, 2004). Research by menu designer Gregg Rapp stated that the sweet-spot was seven items on the menu. The pressure and anxiety of too many choices leaves customers with the possibility that they hadn’t made the optimum choice, and therefore less satisfied. An industry that thrives on customer satisfaction cannot afford such sentiments and hence limit the choices available.

Tricks in relation to menu pricing are along the lines of reducing the ‘pain of paying’ which is a concept materialised by Dan Ariely. He states that every action of spending money causes a certain pain reaction in people, and therefore restaurants aim to reduce the unpleasantness of paying (Ariely, 2008). They do so by firstly eliminating the dollar/rupee sign from the prices. For example, you are more likely to see 7.00 rather than $ 7.00 in an attempt to reduce the link to actual money. Written out prices also tend to result in higher spending, like ‘seven dollars’ rather than $ 7.00. Another practice is eliminating the link between the dish and the price by not putting the dotted lines that lead to the price. ‘Nesting prices’ rather than column prices are another method of reducing the emphasis on the price wherein the prices are placed right next to the description in the same font rather than in a column to the side so that it blends into the description and the eye rolls over it.

An outrageously expensive item is placed at the top of the menu to make everything else following that seems reasonably priced. Slightly expensive items that still fall within the range that customers are willing to pay denote meals of higher quality. Meals that fetch a higher cost tend to be more satisfying to people than meals that are priced lower. This is seen because expectations about taste are based on price ranges, and this in turn becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. A field experiment was conducted wherein the taste perception and satisfaction from the same Italian buffet was measured when it was charged as $4 and $8. Diners who paid $4 were found to have rated it as less tasty, less enjoyable and less satisfactory (Just, Sığırcı & Wansink, 2014).

Another method is to put profitable items in a separate space, for example placing dishes in boxes to differentiate them from the rest. The upper right corner is the most coveted area to place an item, and the item placed there is called the ‘anchor’. It was Gregg Rapp who taught us that the human eye is first drawn to the upper right corner of a paper.

Longer descriptions of dishes in menus lead to higher customer satisfaction (Wansink, Painter & Ittersum, 2001). When the descriptions were more detailed, customers were led to believe that they were getting more for the price they paid. This in turn led to them rating the taste and quality of the dish as higher as well. This was also illustrated in a study done by Wasink, Payne and North wherein the labels placed on wines were falsified based on the country they came from (California and North Dakota), leading to higher satisfaction with the false label related to the better city (California) although the wines were the same in both bottles (Wansink, Payne & North, 2007).

Another trick is to show pictures of the dishes. Studies show that the body responds to a picture of a dish in the same way that it responds to an actual dish. In a state of hunger, customers are known to default to what they see in the picture.

Unlikely links between cutlery and appetite have been researched upon. It was found that the larger the plate size, the smaller people perceive the portion of food to be. Restaurants use this as an advantage to place smaller plates and hence reduce the portions they serve at the same cost, without the customers realising it (Van Ittersum & Wansink, 2012). There were also studies conducted on the effect of the colour of the plate on taste perception of complex foods (for example, desserts). It was found that strawberry mousse used for an experiment was rated as significantly sweeter when served on a white plate (Piqueras-Fiszman, Alcaide, Roura & Spence, 2012).

Servers also influence tipping by customers by projecting friendliness. They draw smiley-faces on the bills and touch the customer on their shoulder to establish certain friendliness, leading to higher tips.

A change in production pioneered by Campbel Soup’s Prego spaghetti sauce came with the teaching that people cannot always explain in words what they want. Research done by Howard Moskowitz yielded that written preferences of people and practical preferences of people when it came to spaghetti sauce stood vastly different (Moskowitz & Gofman, 2007). This came to be the most important psychological revelation to the food industry. Moskowitz propounded that there is no ‘good’ mustard and ‘bad’ mustard, just different mustards for different tastes. He challenged the platonic notion of food and emphasised that the search for universality has been knocked away by the understanding of variability.

As you see, an intricate orchestra of psychological nudges contributes to the way we spend, feel and behave in a restaurant scenario. There is a purpose to every full stop, music note and bow-tie that we see once we have stepped into the area. In an industry that tiptoes around our mood and appetite, no stone is left unturned in order to ensure optimal spending habits (optimal for the restaurant, ofcourse).
And you just wanted some dinner.

References

Ariely, D. (2008). Predictably irrational. New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers.

Dooley, R. (2012). Brainfluence. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.

Just, D., Sığırcı, Ö., & Wansink, B. (2014). Lower Buffet Prices Lead to Less Taste Satisfaction. J Sens Stud, 29(5), 362-370. doi:10.1111/joss.12117

McCall, M., & Lynn, A. (2008). The Effects of Restaurant Menu Item Descriptions on Perceptions of Quality, Price, and Purchase Intention. Journal Of Foodservice Business Research, 11(4), 439-445. doi:10.1080/15378020802519850

Moskowitz, H., & Gofman, A. (2007). Selling blue elephants. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Wharton School Pub.
NORTH, A., SHILCOCK, A., & HARGREAVES, D. (2003). The Effect of Musical Style on Restaurant Customers' Spending. Environment & Behavior, 35(5), 712-718. doi:10.1177/0013916503254749

Piqueras-Fiszman, B., Alcaide, J., Roura, E., & Spence, C. (2012). Is it the plate or is it the food? Assessing the influence of the color (black or white) and shape of the plate on the perception of the food placed on it. Food Quality And Preference, 24(1), 205-208. doi:10.1016/j.foodqual.2011.08.011

Plassmann, H., O'Doherty, J., Shiv, B., & Rangel, A. (2008). Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness. Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences,105(3), 1050-1054. doi:10.1073/pnas.0706929105

Poundstone, W. (2010). Priceless. New York: Hill and Wang.

Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice. New York: Ecco.

Spence, C., & Piqueras-Fiszman, B. The perfect meal.

Van Ittersum, K., & Wansink, B. (2012). Plate Size and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating Behavior. J Consum Res, 39(2), 215-228. doi:10.1086/662615

Kido, M. (2000) Bio-psychological effects of color, Journal of International Society of Life Information Science, Vol. 18 No. 1, pp. 254-62

Wansink, B., Painter, J., & Ittersum, K. (2001). Descriptive Menu Labels’ Effect on Sales. The Cornell Hotel And Restaurant Administration Quarterly, 42(6), 68-72. doi:10.1177/0010880401426008

Wansink, B., Payne, C., & North, J. (2007). Fine as North Dakota wine: Sensory expectations and the intake of companion foods. Physiology & Behavior, 90(5), 712-716. doi:10.1016/j.physbeh.2006.12.010

Originally published at Uncommon Sense, St. Xavier’s College Mumbai.