Posts Tagged ‘Restaurant Psychology’

The humble Philadelphia cheesesteak sandwich is an American classic. It is not a complex recipe: some bread, some steak, some cheese. Rarely do all the ingredients fit into the name of a dish. It is also available everywhere.

So, how does a small steakhouse located in Philadelphia charge $100 for one? That is the question that the owners of Barclay Prime asked themselves. They found a way: and rocketed their restaurant into the spotlight in the process.

No ordinary sandwich

It goes without saying that this is no ordinary cheesesteak. It starts with a freshly baked roll (baked in-house, of course) and features Wagyu rib eye and foie gras and is finished off with plenty of truffles.

Oh, and it comes with half a bottle of vintage champagne.

Does anyone buy it? It turns out that they do. Often, groups will get one to share between them. Doing this brings the cost down while granting everyone the bragging rights.

But the truth is that Barclay Prime do not have $100 cheesesteak on their menu because they think it will be a good money-spinner. That’s not what most of their customers are there for.

But, as I bang on about in my book Why Restaurants Fail, the success of a joint has little to do with the food. It is about whether a restaurant understands customer psychology and marketing. And Barclay Prime do.

The ultimate promotional tool

In Contagious: Why Things Catch On, professor of marketing Johan Berger talks about how to make a marketing strategy go viral. He uses Barclay Prime as a case study because it is one of the best examples of how a restaurant can use a single dish to create a massive wave.

People like to share interesting stories. It gives them social currency. And a restaurant charging $100 for a cheesesteak is an interesting story. It is hard not to tell people about it.

It is not just the novelty of it that helps it go viral. The dish fulfils many different points on the imaginary checklist of things that make something contagious.

It provokes emotion. In this case, it is almost a sense of awe. “Wow, someone is charging $100 for a cheesesteak and people are buying it!” There is shock value there: you can’t hear that and not perk up.

Being able to say you have had the cheesesteak makes you look like a big shot. And when it comes down to basic psychology, most of us are subconsciously trying to impress the opposite sex with displays of wealth.

People are proud to have eaten it. They take photos of it and share it on their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Celebrities turn up to try it which then provides even more credibility.

And the media start writing about it, too. In the age of 24-hour news, the machine is ever hungry for anything they can fill some air time or column inches with. This story gave them that.

Critically, you cannot tell the story without talking about Barclay Prime. Nobody would be interested in “I ate it at a restaurant”. You have to say which restaurant it is. And that gets Barclay Prime talked about by everybody.

How to make your food go viral

Making great food might get your restaurant talked about. A few people might tell their friends that they had a good time and the food was nice.

If you want more people to talk about your food, make it really bad. The adage goes that people will tell three people about a good experience, but ten people about a bad experience. The additional promotion might not be so good for business, though.

But if you want everybody to be talking about your restaurant, you need to come up with something that has the potential to go viral. It’s not random: there are rules to it. Barclay Prime understood those rules, and if you can learn them too, you have the same opportunity.

What are the rules?

Your food, or the experience, needs to invoke emotion. And this needs to be a high-arousal emotion. People who are full and content are not in a high state of arousal. They do not rush to share photos or tell their friends about it.

High-arousal emotions include surprise, delight and awe. How can you work these into your food? It’s no easy challenge. People enjoy great food, but they talk about novel food.

Here are some more examples:

• The Fat Duck offers “multi-sensory food” including an egg and bacon ice cream and dishes that include audio elements.
• Red’s True Barbecue makes a doughnut burger. It is a burger but served inside a doughnut, rather than a bread bun.

Critically, you have to deliver on your promise, too. Your food has to be both amazing and novel. The $100 cheesesteak works because it is so surprising: but also tastes divine thanks to the Wagyu beef and truffles.

Summary

Charging $100 for a cheesesteak was a bold move for Barclay Prime. But it paid off big time. People bought it, but more importantly, people talked about it. Rather than spending on advertising, people were paying them.

If you want your food to go viral, it needs to provoke emotion. You need to fill people with awe, surprise and delight. And you need to deliver on that promise. If you do, people will tell their friends about it.

When it comes to designing your restaurant’s menu, having a deep understanding of customer psychology can be very helpful. Understanding how the human brain works allows you to increase revenue with almost no effort.

Here are 6 ways you can increase the average bill by making small changes to your menu.

Add a larger priced item

Human minds are really bad at considering absolutes. We like to compare two things, instead. In Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely talks about how a marketing firm found a way to sell a $1200 bread-maker: they added a $1600 one next to it.

When the only bread-maker is $1200, people wonder if they need a bread-maker. However, when you place it next to a $1600 bread-maker, people compare the two to see which one they want. And usually, decide on the $1200 one.

So, if you have a $30 steak that you are struggling to shift, add a $50 steak. People are reluctant to buy the most expensive item on the menu. But next to a $50 steak, a $30 one seems far more reasonable.

Put expensive items in a box

Putting a box around an item draws the customer’s attention to it. This makes them more likely to order the dish. So, if you have something you want to sell, such as high mark-up dish, put a box around it.

Desserts are usually high markup, so these make an excellent choice. However, you can put a box around individual dishes as well, and it produces the same result.

Re-do your wine list

Customers cannot tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine. Study after study has shown this. So, as long as you are selling them a decent bottle, their enjoyment of it will be primarily driven by how much they pay for it.

Many customers will order the cheapest bottle of wine. So make sure you have plenty of markup on that. However, another large selection of customers will order the second cheapest bottle of wine.

This is because they do not want to look like they are going for the cheapest bottle, even though they do not know what wine they want. Therefore, you want to ensure that the second bottle is a high markup item as well.

Finally, as we have already learnt, adding a more expensive item to the menu drives up sales of cheaper bottles. So make sure that you have at least one bottle of $300 on there.

Add more “for two” dishes

One of my local Thai restaurants has appetisers for £7. Or you can get the platter for £10. Per person. And there is a minimum of two people. So, in reality, you are paying £20.

But the menu doesn’t say that. It says £10 per person. Most people never do the maths and think “£20: I could get three of the other dish for almost the same money.”

Add to this mix the fact that couples are some of the least price sensitive customers. After all, who wants to look cheap on a date? No wonder the chateaubriand is so often priced for two.

Centre align your prices

If you put all of your prices in a neat little line, with everything right aligned, you make it very easy for the customer to compare prices between dishes.

But, of course, you probably don’t want to make this easy. Because, if you do, people will choose cheaper options. This is a shame because the more expensive items on your menu are worth the money, right? Centre align the prices so that customers consider each dish on its individual merits.

Reduce the number of items

Having two many items on your menu is a bad thing for two reasons.

One is that quality suffers. You need to be turning your stock over. If nobody is ordering the dish, the ingredients will sit in your walk-in for longer, they won’t be as fresh, and you will have higher food costs.

It also makes it more difficult for customers to decide what to have. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz talks about a store offering free samples of jam. They found that when they offered six choices, customers bought more jam than when they offered 22 choices.

What was going on here? Customers found it difficult to choose between 22 choices. The stress of making that choice (it might sound silly, but it is stressful!) made them less likely to buy a full-sized pot of any.

Your menu is the same: if you want customers to enjoy the experience more, you need to make it easier on them. They might think they want more choice, but the research shows it makes them less happy.

Summary

Follow these six simple ideas, and you will be able to increase the average cheque size. Understanding customer psychology is the key to running a successful restaurant. The answers are not always intuitive, so it is important to look at the evidence.