Restaurant Marketing is image centric, it is more effective when pictures of food and drink are used to communicate the food’s style and the skill with which it was put together. It is easy to copy some text from a menu and put it on yours, but much more difficult to actually reproduce the food that a skilled restaurant kitchen can make. Therefore showing the food you make in your restaurant marketing via photographs is an obvious step that nearly every restaurant employs. From their print ads, to their websites, it is ubiquitous.
How do we stand out?
We make the photographs better in our restaurant Marketing. This should be one of the restaurant’s primary marketing goals, and today I am going to share a scientifically proven tip to help make that happen. When photographing the food you should place a utensil in the photo, and not just anywhere. Always place the utensil on the right-handed side of the plate.
Studies show a nearly 29% increase in the likelihood that a person would want to buy the item than if the utensil was on the other side. Incredible. (source)
The reason is that seeing the utensil on the side of the plate that they would use helped the viewers to visualize themselves picking it up and eating the dish, which increased their intent to purchase.
Now what about the lefties? Well sorry but with the number of right-handed people potentially as high as 90% of the population it is clearly a no-brainer to take the 29% increase by tailoring the restaurant marketing messages to them.
I believe the reason for this also has to do with the identification that happens between a person and the message that the (correctly aligned utensil) plate of food delivers. Which is: “This could be mine” as opposed to a (no utensil plate) that delivers: “This is a photo for advertising” and an (incorrectly aligned utensil plate) which delivers “This is someone else’s food.”
In any event the fact remains simple to execute. In your restaurant marketing photographs align the utensil where a right-handed person would use it.
Here is the point and shoot I would recommend for its low light ability, manual adjustments, and image quality.
Canon PowerShot S95 10 MP Digital Camera with 3.8x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 3.0-Inch LCD
What do you think? Give me some feedback in the comments, and find me on twitter @spirocks
Comments
5 responses to “Restaurant Marketing: Image Tip”
I couldn’t agree more. Quality images are imperative for restaurant marketing. Strong post Spiro.
Thanks David, the reaction to food photos by people (especially hungry people to good photos) is one that goes beyond our conscious thoughts. It is a basic idea that should be thought of more by restaurants in their marketing.
I love that putting a utensil increases the likelihood of purchase by 29%. Great article!
Thanks its a cool study that I had to share…
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