A question often asked is, “What’s in a name?” For a restaurant, we would like to ask, What’s in a restaurant menu? A name is significant, and what is in a restaurant menu, as well as the design of the menu, is also significant.
Based on an article featured on WebstaurantStore, your menu can be profitably engineered when deep thought is given to its design. The menu is deemed to be your most valuable marketing component and an effective advertising tool that can boost your profits. A thoughtful design of your menu involves an assessment of how lucrative and popular your menu items are. In addition to the boost your lucrative menu items will gain from the engineering and psychology strategies you will employ, your valuable customers will also benefit from an enhanced customer experience. Consider the following psychology-based menu engineering fundamentals and pointers:
- Study your menu items to identify the most profitable and popular ones. Be sure the menu is properly priced to maximize profit and learn how to plot your menu items with a menu matrix.
- Revamp your menu using the available menu engineering strategies that have been identified by menu psychologists and engineers. These strategies involve highlighting selected items and muting the costs of meals. They inspire guests to choose high-profit items and incur greater expenditure on them. You can accentuate high-profit items by using attention-grabbing tactics, placing these items in strategic positions on the menu, placing the most lucrative items at the top of each section – and one at the bottom, including an overly priced decoy item near the high-profit items, and so on.
Making the most profitable use of your menu is considered to be both an art and a science. Register for eCornell’s Restaurant Revenue Management program and learn the art and science of profiting maximally from your restaurant menu.
eCornell courses are approved by SkillsFuture Singapore for SkillsFuture Credit as well as by HRDF Malaysia under its SBL Scheme.