Can I see the menu, please!
Why online menus are damaging your restaurant’s brand experience
Like many of you who endured what seemed like a neverending run of lockdowns, I was sustained by my excitement and anticipation to return to my favourite cafes, restaurants and drinking holes. Virtual catch ups over drinks were as good as social interactions would get and conversations always seemed to steer towards where we will first head to once we finally could, what experiences have we missed most and what cuisines are we longing for that we couldn’t replicate at home.
As a Melbourne local, to say the dining experience has cultural significance is an understatement. As much as we endured the lockdowns, no one suffered greater than the hospitality industry despite our best efforts in ordering more home delivery meals than we’d be proud to admit. Before too long, we were able to enjoy the cuisines of some of our more premium restaurants at home thanks to Shane Delia’s Providoor. What separated this dining experience from other home delivery services was how these restaurants understood that their customers weren’t just purchasing food, they wanted to experience it. With the orders my family and I excitedly placed, along with the food that we had to partially prepare, we were also provided other items like printed instructions, posters and coasters. All tangible, tactile elements that elevated the dining experience and brought us one step closer to actually being there. Some even created a Spotify playlist to take the immersion to another level. These restaurants understood their brand experience and valued the connection if formed with their customers.
When we were finally able to venture beyond our four walls and step foot into venues, it wasn’t without some compromises but at that point, they could’ve taken my right arm for me to get in. One of the changes was the introduction of online menu systems activated by snapping a QR code that we were all too familiar with by that point. It saved staff and customers from handling physical menus while limiting their interaction which made plenty of sense at the time. However, that time has passed and what was once a compromise we had to make to reopen the doors is now a detriment to the restaurant’s branded dining experience.
THE BRANDED DINING EXPERIENCE
Your brand, at its core, is built on trust. The trust you will deliver on your brand promise. A brand promise can be understood as the expression and delivery of what your brand stands for and what it sets out to do. The expression is in the communication through every touchpoint with your audience, the delivery is in the execution of what is communicated while the trust is established when your audience believes what you expressed to be true. Much like how we as people develop trust in others over time through multiple interactions, we learn to align what they say with what they do and determine if they are trustworthy.
With restaurants, there’s an inherent promise of an experience beyond culinary. When a customer chooses to dine at your restaurant, they have chosen this specific place to be immersed in, to be captivated by a multi-sensory experience they often want to share with others. By virtue, they have also chosen to forgo any other experience. Of course, the food takes centre stage but how much it is appreciated is influenced by all sensory input contributing to your customer deciding whether or not the dining experience delivered on its brand promise.
With this in mind, restaurants have it in their customers’ best interest to maintain control over what the sensory input is. With digital menus, a customer has to interact with their phone - a device that has its own detached experience - taking their focus away from the environment they're in and the company around them. The immersive restaurant experience is broken and depending on how cumbersome the process of bringing up and ordering through the online menu system is or if the customer continues to interact with their phone, it may even be tarnished. This is all before the food has even come out.
Waiter! An article written by Hilary McNevin in 2010 where she spoke to Melbourne waiters about restaurant service and the importance of letting them guide you through your dining experience. It is as essential now as it was then. Image: Aaron Fong/Broadsheet
UNIQUELY YOU vs UBIQUITOUSNESS
With every sensory input contributing to the overall dining experience, restaurants should consider each of these touch points as opportunities to feed back to the delivery of their brand promise. With many restaurants continuing to utilise online menu systems, they are at the mercy of these platforms engineering how customers interact with them. The user interface and brand presentation is designed specifically for the benefit of those platforms. Their modest design is built for utility across all dining experiences stripping away the lustre of the unique brand. Their systematic approach replaces the customer’s desire for a novel experience. In an era where many facets of our lives are turning digital and becoming homogenised, branding is more important than ever. Ironically, strong brands leverage custom sensory experiences and aim to distinguish themselves from the pack as much as possible.
With as much consideration given to comfort of the seats or the weight of the cutlery - the tactile experience - the same should be given to how your cuisine is introduced to your customer in the presentation of the menu. A tangible menu coupled with visual brand expressions engages multiple senses that uniquely represents your brand, elevates the initial impression of the cuisine which enriches your customers’ overall dining experience. One piece contributing to the delivery of the brand promise.
“Their modest design is built for utility across all dining experiences stripping away the lustre of the unique brand.”
THE HUMAN BRAND
In 1967, renowned behavioural psychologist Dr. Albert Mehrabian conducted two studies that analysed the degree of influence of nonverbal communication where he concluded that 55% of communication is body language, 38% is the tone of voice, and 7% is the actual words spoken. Although he derived these numbers from the specific parameters set in the studies, they have often been misquoted to represent all communication stirring conjecture around their appropriation and the accuracy in which a percentage can be attributed given varying contexts in how we engage with each other. Despite this, the consensus remains that much of what we take from interpersonal exchanges is not attributed to the actual words being used but in the expression. Communication is nuanced.
While online menu systems purposefully limited communication between waiting staff and customers amid the reopening of venues during the pandemic, it paradoxically stifled the very thing we yearned for during lockdowns: human interaction.
As the success of your brand is built on trust and trust is an emotional response, your customers are more inclined to extend it if they are better able to emotionally align with an authentic human brand. With this, waiting staff play a vital role as extensions of the branded dining experience and have the capacity to engage with customers far deeper than the words displayed on a digital screen. They are responsible for more than running food to the table, they are the conductors of the dining experience and custodians of the brand promise.
ARE YOU READY TO ORDER?
It may be said that online menu systems are the way of the future and they quite possibly are. As cafes, restaurants and bars begin to better identify its utility in their own space these systems will take shape. Some venues rely on delivering a unique branded dining experience as we are accustomed to while others will embrace this as part of their brand. After all, I’ll be the first to admit that while in Japan, ordering my ramen from a ticket machine and having it delivered on a conveyor belt was pretty neat.
As it stands though, an effective brand’s focus is always on the benefit of the customer. With this said, I would argue that these general purpose online menu systems are not. They are asking the customer to do the work that they previously paid for, then audaciously ask if they want to give a tip before any service has been provided.
There are a multitude of components that contribute to a brand’s efficacy. The more of them that accurately express the brand promise, the clearer it becomes and the more human-like qualities that you can inject into your brand, the deeper the connection you will create with your customers; Very much like how we connect with people. So, how does your brand express its promise and how does it deliver on it?
For more information on how brand strategy can help your restaurant find its audience and deliver an experience that they resonate with, click the link below