Influence Tips for Running a Restaurant – Part 1

Lots and lots of travel during the first half of the year! By the time it was over, I’d visited Baltimore, MD; Austin, TX; Nashville, TN; Chicago, IL; Greensboro, NC; Cincinnati, OH; State College, PA; Cleveland, OH; Milbank, SD; Des Moines, IA; Indianapolis, IN—and possibly a few other places I’ve forgotten. With all the travel came many nights in hotels and dining out.

I’ve blogged before about how hotels are bungling opportunities to encourage more guests to reuse towels and bed sheets to help the environment, so I’ll steer clear of that this week. If you want to learn about what those hotels could do, click here.

As you can imagine, with all the meals on the road, I’ve had ample opportunity to observe how restaurants operate. When it comes to engaging customers to help them enjoy the dining experience a little more—and ultimately improve the restaurant’s bottom line—there’s plenty of room for improvement. So, I thought I’d share some psychological tips for running a restaurant. These are ideas I’d personally implement if I owned one.

I’ll state up front that most of these ideas can be implemented without spending additional money—or very little in some cases. Restaurant owners, do I have your attention? Because there’s a lot to explore, and due to the need to explain the psychology behind my suggestions, this will be a multi-part series of short blog posts over four weeks.

Let’s start with the menu and talk specifically about wine. All too often, after grouping wines (Merlot, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, Shiraz, etc.), the listings seem haphazard—at least to the non-wine connoisseur. Unless you have a very upscale restaurant catering to wine lovers, I think this is a mistake. Much of the time, the cheapest wines are listed first, which is an even bigger mistake!

In psychology, there’s something known as the contrast phenomenon, which tells us that what people see or experience first greatly impacts how they perceive the next stimuli they encounter. For example, when buying a suit, no good salesperson would start the process by showing the client accessories. If they did, the cost of the suit would seem too expensive by comparison. Think about it: if you’re first shown a shirt-and-tie combo costing $75–$100, the suit seems even pricier.

The smart salesperson sells the suit first because, by comparison, the shirt and tie don’t seem as expensive. Even if the customer doesn’t buy the accessories, at least the big-ticket item was sold.

How does this relate to restaurants selling wine? If the average customer starts reading the menu and sees a $20 bottle first, then by the time they get to the $200 bottle, it seems exorbitantly expensive by comparison. However, if the more expensive wines are listed first, then a $75 or $50 bottle starts to seem like a bargain.

Simply rearranging the order of wines—from most expensive to least—when new menus are printed should lead to increased sales. More people are apt to buy pricier wines. They may not go for the $200 bottle, but they’re much more likely to consider some of the other higher-priced options.

The same thought process applies to other menu items. After separating entrees from sandwiches and salads from starters, the restaurant owner would do well to list food items from most expensive to least expensive.

Next week, we’ll look at some things the waitstaff can do to increase customer satisfaction and tips.

Brian, CMCT
influencepeople
Helping You Learn to Hear “Yes”.

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