Years ago, my wife’s friend who was the marketing director of a regional chain of family friendly restaurants told us about a few menu positioning tactics that are used to maximize revenue. The one I still remember is the item on the first inside page on the top right corner is the item with the highest margin, usually pasta. The reasoning for the placement is that people who didn’t have a strong preference for what they wanted would scan the entire menu and then return to the beginning of the menu and get “stuck” in the corner on their second pass. I’m not sure if this is based in any research but it’s a fun thing to look for when you are out to eat.
You are 100% correct and there is plenty of "science" that goes into it.
It is similar to how a person reads a website[0][1], in an F pattern; The most important information should be top right, with lower importance being down below.
Also, all hier tier items (think steak/shrimp) are always near the middle of the menu, to "sandwich" them between items that are more cost conscious in order to downplay the price difference.
I worked for a large restaurant retailer in the corporate office. It's a mistake to call it a restaurant company. These companies are marketing companies and marketing drives everthing. Even to the detriment of operations and efficiency.
> These companies are marketing companies and marketing drives everything.
This is a huge problem with our society. Marketing is important, but when it takes over it destroys companies, people and eventually society itself.
We see it with restaurants. Once, a restaurant was simply a place which served food; now it's a brand, an experience, a carefully-crafted image which imparts all the right feelings but only some of the substance — if any.
We see it with food. The produce we buy isn't the healthiest or the most nutritious: it's what looks healthiest & most nutritious, by metrics which no longer come close to making sense (e.g. the redness of a tomato doesn't signify ripeness in a world with artificial pseudo-ripening, and the shininess of an apple is meaningless in a world with vegetable wax).
We see it with relationships, with entertainment, with hardware (c.f. speculative execution & caching), with software (c.f. shiny effects), with political parties, with 'news' — in a word, everything. Our world is being destroyed by marketing, by appearance with no substance to back it up.
I can only identify the problem; I don't know what the solution is.
>“Asian food no longer has a health halo merely by existing,” the manager explained as I cleared away plates of mangled spring rolls. “The once ‘healthy’ perceptions of brown rice and lettuce cups aren’t believable anymore. Today, guests are linking health to nutrient density. Ancient grains. Avocado. Micro-greens.”
The experts' domain here is not what is actually healthy. Actual health doesn't even enter consideration. It's what "guests" are "linking" with health, that is, only perception matters because the operational goal is personal profit above doing right. Our food industry at large is suffering from a total preoccupation with orthogonal concerns, of which our insane food culture is the natural consequence.
Michael Pollam has written about this extensively... the proliferation of "magic ingredients" that confer "healthy" status on the same old food. "Ancient grains" are just starch. Omega-3 fatty acids are just oil. Etc. The fashion changes, but the structure stays the same.
Chain restaurant food relies on year-round availability of ingredients of consistent quality (although "seasonal menus" exist, they're more about marketing than availability, the illusion of freshness again). Lots of white flour, vegetable oil, refined sugar, factory-farmed meats. Restaurants are more factory than art. Raw ingredients go in, get turned to finished products and sold on-site.
> Chain restaurant food relies on year-round availability of ingredients of consistent quality (although "seasonal menus" exist, they're more about marketing than availability, the illusion of freshness again)
Yep. The yearly appearance of the mcrib and its huge marketing push tracks the price of pork futures. McDonalds is a commodities trader as much as it is anything else.
My mind jumps to something Budweiser did, after being purchased by InBev. Their recipe uses a particular hops from a unique valley in Germany. Under InBev, they suddenly declared they had enough of these hops, and wouldn't buy any more for a year. This crushed farmers in that valley, of course... and then Budweiser could negotiate for better prices with the survivors a year later.
Get off Facebook, stop eating at chain restaurants, stop buying branded clothes at national retailers, so on and so on, and encourage family and friends to do the same. Think you can’t make a difference? If as white-collar, voting, monied professionals we can’t alter the landscape with our spending habits… then use our entrepreneurial abilities to create businesses that are the antithesis of these trends.
Looking too far into this issue depresses me so much that it's hard for me to talk about without getting emotional.
Consider an easy recipe for a tasty lunch- bread, cheese, tomato, mustard. In the US, buying these ingredients off the shelf of a major grocery store and assembling a sandwich results in a disgusting combination.
These are four ingredients that should be delicious- and yet you have to hunt to find edible versions of each of these items and often pay wildly high prices. Store-bought tomatoes taste like water. Even the artisan bakery sections yield bitter, preservative-laden bread. Mustard is created in vats to maximize shelf life instead of quality. If you don't know how to find artisan cheese, you're stuck with plastic garbage. But the sandwich will look* incredible, like the platonic ideal of a sandwich.
This trend of cheap, attractive food is trickling up even into restaurants. I just moved to Houston, and with every new restaurant I go to I become more and more frustrated with the bland, uninspiring food even at local "hot spots". I've seen the most beautiful, awe-inspiring sushi, tacos, and burgers- all that taste like nothing.
The only places that remain safe are immigrant-run foreign grocery stores, most of which who will go out of business in the next two decades as their owners die, and their kids go into fields that actually generate money.
*Emotional because of how the basic pleasures of existing are continually sold out in order to protect the bottom line- for instance imagine living in a world with zero wilderness, in which there literally wasn't a direction you couldn't turn without seeing human influence. It's already hard to go to coastal towns and watch the waves because you'll be able to see the giant mega-hotels lit up with balcony lights.
Wow this affected me more than I'd like to admit. As an avid veggie gardener, I highly recommend growing your own veggies and baking your own bread (there are cheap bread loaf machines).
That's what I'm planning on. I almost cried (okay, that's hyperbole) the first time I grew tomatoes in my backyard in college. If I wasn't in an apartment right now I'd have planted already.
While I agree with the gist of your comment, most restaurants have never been "simply a place which served food." They've always been about the experience, excepting maybe cafeterias which are purely functional food delivery facilities.
A taco/hot dog stand is a deliberate choice wrt to the food delivery experience, i.e., informal and on-the-go. Steakhouses have always presented themselves as more formal dining options. (This includes Sizzlers! In rural areas, chains like Sizzlers have the same cachet that Mastro's or Ruth's Chris has in a big city.)
Wow, quite a long-distance abstraction. Kinda blew my mind. From restaurants to relationships and speculative execution.
It’s all about the looks, indeed.
One thing that maybe fits with this is the societal hierarchy of our senses.
Seeing is somehow assumed to be much more objective than hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting.
If you have very good hearing you might have found yourself in situations where you perceive an unpleasant noise that’s below other people’s thresholds and then it’s not too uncommon to be seen as a bit of a loony if you bring it up.
Smelling is the most subtle, instinctive and animal-like sense. Usually people are very polite there and in our current time it’s the norm to not say anything even if e.g. someone emits strong body odor that’s actively bothering the environment.
Vision however is thought to be objective.
Photography. Pic or it didn’t happen.
If object classifier checks out, it’s legit. (What else could there be?!)
Digital image just like retinal image, right!?
So if you get what looks desirable (that shiny tomato or that pretty partner), you have it, you have made it. You don’t have to doubt anything because you saw similar images a thousand times in contexts that clearly said “this is desirable”.
A lot comes down to how well our associative brains work with visual stimuli.
The way out of this IMHO is to stand up and build confidence and trust in your senses. If something tastes off, treat it of same significance as if that steak was suddenly of green-blue color. That would be alarming. It’s probably fine, maybe these veggies are just lacking in taste, so not dangerous but unsatisfying. If you need acting inspiration, watch that scene from Mulholland Drive where the Italian guy doesn’t quite like his espresso.
And regarding trends, the tomatoes in Europe have gotten a lot better in the last decade, particularly in the last five years and that’s largely due to Dutch farmers starting to focus on producing strains with a lot of aroma. It started off as a more pricy premium option but now they’re affordable and available all year-round.
It's all a simulation. The chain restaurant's food is a simulacra of food; a collection of symbols with associations to food, the symbols targeted directly rather than via what they're supposed to signify. Baudrillard put his finger on this pretty well.
In fact, a lot of marketing dollars are spent advertising the things you seem to cherish. Organic food, healthy food, fitness, health — they're multi-billion dollar industries, with multi-billion dollar advertising budgets.
This is also the case for the majority of businesses that produce consumer goods these days. Companies are now purely design and marketing shops (for example, any company involved with sporting goods). Engineering, manufacturing, materials, warehousing, the "boring" parts...all farmed out with added markup.
Yes. So much of our economy is driven by marketing. Many of the smartest young people in our economy used to go to Wall Street, now many get MBAs and go into marketing.
Same thing with Google, Facebook - marketing and advertising control our economy. (And the danger western democracies face: It’s a natural switch from marketing to political influencing. Tools and methods are the same and the same infrastructure can be used.)
You do realize that engineers make much more then marketers as a rule, right? Marketing careers start at like 30k a year and are competitive. You can make a lot of money later in your career if you're good at it, but same is true for engineers.
I don't think it's about the political system so much as the economic system.
Any economic system is an attempt to solve the core problem of how to best distribute resources to consumers of resources. But what happens at the point when ideal distribution is attained, and all consumers are satisfied? If the economy just shut down, it would be a social disaster, so instead it enters this kind of degenerate state you mention where marketing and advertising predominate over production and distribution. Like a star going supernova- all the useful fuel is burned up, but we must sustain the reaction somehow, so we have to turn to heavier and heavier elements.
There is an upside to this, actually order the money losing items at fast casual restaurants etc and it's a great deal.
PS: Also, look for companies that defect from the marketing game which allows them to sell very high quality products for cheap. Think store brand items etc.
> But what happens at the point when ideal distribution is attained, and all consumers are satisfied?
I don't think we are anywhere close that, nor that we can ever get there. What happened is that most low-hanging fruits of actual value got picked, to the point that sales & marketing started to have much better ROI than trying to invent and build better things. It's a gradual shift towards a zero-sum-game economy.
The reason we can't ever totally satisfy consumer demand is because of marketing itself. As much as the profession likes to pretend it's about informing consumers of available choices in a free market, it is more fundamentally about creating demand. If we had spent the last two centuries fulfilling the consumer demands of 1818 consumers, we'd have been "done" decades ago, worldwide, if not sooner. Instead, before we ever get to the "demand satisfied" state, our demands are manipulated by marketeers so that we never reach this equilibrium.
It's absolutely based on research, and franchised restaurants have been at the forefront of figuring a lot of stuff out.
Ever notice how the price of an individual hamburger or cheeseburger is nearly impossible to find on the McDonald's drive thru menu? That's because they want you to buy a value menu where they're making ~70% fully costed margin on the fries and north of 90% on the soda.
National level chains were mercilessly A/B testing different menu configurations for both average order size and average order margin a long time ago, way before it was cool.
There are companies that do face and eye tracking on large menu displays. They can AB test new menus or layouts quickly, on the fly during the day, at different locations. They can recognize customer demographic (maybe even individuals now), what they look at and for how long, and then tie that to what they buy.
Think bigger. Like all menus at all McDonald's, each individually addressable. They probably have a marketing command center where they run experiments on all kinds of things.
