Do We Overestimate Menu’s Selling Capability?

Menu has done a great job by communicating with customers. However, can menu sell? Bowen and Morris’s study published on International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management in 1995 showed that we might have been too optimistic about menu’s selling capability.

This study was one of the earliest empirical researches on menu’s selling capability. Although it had some limitations, findings and implications were still worth thinking about.

Double-lined boxes, small-line illustration and larger font sizes are some of the commonly accepted techniques in highlighting an item in menu design. From eye-movement studies, it is also found that top of the right-hand page is a focal point attracting most attention. Bowen and Morris adopted these techniques in designing target item---Salad & Soup---to make it noticeable at the menu, and investigated whether the sales of Salad & Soup would see a big increase after the menu treatment.

However, the expected increase didn’t happen. While the exposure of the item increased, the sales of it didn’t go up correspondingly.

Even though the results failed to support menu’s selling capacity, Bowen and Morris also pointed out that this single study was not conclusive enough to say that menu design cannot influence the sale of a specific menu item.

A factor contributing to the failure of sales in their experiment, as they analyzed, might be the full-service restaurant setting where the experiment was conducted. In a full-service restaurant, customers get more interaction and information from staff people, and the impact of menu information might be diminished correspondingly. However, in a quick-service restaurant, customers are more relying on menus as most items are common and less explanation needed, so that menu’s selling capacity would be more evident. This might also be an explanation for the sales increase in menu experiments conducted in fast-food outlets.   

Interestingly, although menu’s selling capacity is not supported, Bowen and Morris were inspired by this experiment and put forward two new propositions which seem to be quite reasonable and appealing for further study:

Firstly, menu’s selling capacity increases as customer contact decreases. This is consistent with the failure analysis on full-service restaurant vs. quick-service analysis.

Secondly, in full-service restaurant, instead of completely relying on menu’s selling capacity, service person should use menus as a sales tool in promoting items. The highlighting of certain menu item makes it much easier for service person to promote it.

 

Reference:

Bowen, J. T., & Morris, A. J. (1995). Menu design: Can menus sell. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 7(4), 4-9. doi:10.1108/09596119510091699