(Excerpts from Time Magazine and Reuters)
Restaurants using fancy typeface on their menus can often get away
with fancy prices too, because people perceive complicated fonts to
mean complex foods that need greater skill to prepare, according to a
U.S. study.
Researchers Hyunjin
Song and Norbert Schwarz, from the University of Michigan and writing in the October issue
of Psychological
Science, have concluded from research that small changes in the fonts on a
menu can significantly alter people's perception of the food they are
ordering, including its value.
"People infer that if something on a menu is difficult to understand or
hard to read that it takes great skill and effort to prepare," says Song. Likewise,
Song reports, using an offbeat font to obscure a dish's
description may signal hidden value to an unsuspecting diner on unfamiliar
ground.
This would explain the logic and trend of restaurants offering
exorbitant entrees printed on menus with scripted fonts in microscopic
print. So commonplace is this trend, that some restaurants in New York
City now offer reading glasses for diners who need them. They do so, not
because their menus are poorly designed, which they are not, but
because some guests, particularly those with declining visions, are
now used to using reading glasses to read menus with fine print.
Song's experiments compared subjects responses to identical menu
item descriptions in the font Arial (a standard Windows font)
and the harder-to-read Mistral font (a font that comes with MenuPro).
Subjects in the latter case were more likely to conclude that the dish required great skill and was harder to
prepare.
Song reports that, based on her findings, she might recommend that
if restaurant owners want to give consumers the impression that their
food is complex and of special value, they should consider styling their
menus accordingly.
Not everyone is in agreement with Song's findings. Some restaurant
marketing professionals believe fancy fonts, although they suggest sophistication,
can also be pretentious and unapproachable. They argue, type that is
readable can boost sales for certain types of restaurants, including
those that serve primarily organic food, where customers tend to value
an easy-to-read font more highly.
