Heavy or Light: Physical Appearance of Menu Changes Customer’s Mind

Although never speaking, menu is a true spokesman, which conveys the feature, image and personality of the restaurant. While menus are handed to customers upon their arrival, customers are getting clues of the quality and service level of the restaurant by glancing at the menu.

The link between the menu’s physical appearance (eg. background color, paper material, typeface, etc.) and customer’s perception of the restaurant has increasingly attracted attention of menu researchers over the past two decades. An empirical research published in 2015 on International Journal Hospitality Management indicated that: Customers are more likely to consider it as an upscale restaurant and offering high-quality service if the menu is heavy with fancy font.

The study was conducted by Magnini and Kim. They tested how the weight, font and background color of a menu will change customer’s mind of a restaurant:

In their experiment, eight sample menus vary from light/heavy, italicized/non-italicized and gold/white background color were tested. 265 participants were randomly assigned to each treatment conditions, and instructed to read menus as if they were presented in a restaurant. Then participants were asked to rate what scale and service quality of the restaurant they consider to be. In order to diminish other interference, price information was absent and participants were unable to see the other treatment conditions.

The results showed that heavy menus coupled with italicized font lead to the best perception of upscale and high service quality, while background color didn’t show much influence on customer’s perception.   

This research put forward a pretty easily implemented menu design strategy. If your restaurant wishes to be perceived as more upscale and high quality, then simply change a fancy font—such as Italic—and wear a heavy menu jacket! It is really low cost and such a little change can make a difference.

However, there are some tricks behind that we have to be very careful:

Firstly, menu style should be consistent with the overall style of the restaurant. Heavy menus and fancy font not fit all restaurants. Even printed menus, sometimes are not the best option for a particular restaurant. It is not surprising today seeing a handwritten-blackboard menu as part of interior décor in a boutique restaurant, or using food models as menu instead of printed menu in some Asian restaurants. So, although Magnini and Kim’s research finding is quite inspiring, the practice of it is not universally suitable. Please be wise designing your menu.

Secondly, when the restaurant is perceived as upscale and high quality, customer’s expectation goes higher as well. It also means that restaurant has to give much more efforts and providing much higher service standard to meet or exceed such high expectation in order to make customers satisfied. Otherwise, customers may be disappointed which might lead to quite negative impact on restaurant business. So before changing your menu, please think about this: Are you really ready?

Reference:

Magnini, V. P., & Kim, S. (2016). The influences of restaurant menu font style, background color, and physical weight on consumers’ perceptions. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 53, 42-48. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2015.11.001