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If descriptive menu-item labels are used sparingly and appropriately, they may be able to improve sales and post-consumption attitudes of both the food and the restaurant.
Many restaurant chains have turned to descriptive menu labels-such as Jack Daniels(R) Chicken, Psychedelic Sorbet(R), or the Blooming Onion(R)-in an effort to influence customers' choices and attitudes. The use of descriptive menu labels is common in the hospitality industry,1 but we wondered whether simply changing the menu labels from generic, straightforward names to descriptive names actually influences sales, or, for that matter, makes a customer actually believe the food tastes better. While there are indications that labels can influence taste, most labeling studies have focused only on the effect of nutritional labels, health labels, and warning labels, 3 and not on descriptive marketing-oriented labels.
To learn more about the effect of descriptive labels, we conducted a six-week-long field study of six items on a cafeteria's menu to answer these three questions:
* Do descriptive labels increase sales?,
* Do descriptive labels make customers believe the food tastes better?, and
* Do descriptive labels influence customers' attitudes toward a restaurant and their intent to return?
After showing how some consumers evaluate descriptive labels, we describe a controlled field study that investigated how descriptive menuitem labels influenced customers' purchases, postconsumption evaluation, and repurchase intentions of six menu items (see the sidebar at right). Following this, we give suggestions that managers might use in generating descriptive labels and where they should draw the line in using them.
How consumers evaluate descriptive menu labels. Consumers' selection of items from a menu entails more than simply the process of elimination.4 Customers scan menus (or, in the case of our study, cafeteria signs) looking for benefits they believe will satisfy their expectations at that point in time.5 Consider how consumers will evaluate "Grandma's Homemade Apple Pie." If they associate "Grandma's" with "a lot of flavor," they will adjust their beliefs about the characteristics of Grandma's cooking (flavorful) with the characteristics of apple pie (sweet, spicy). They then apply the assumptions they have about Grandma's cooking to what they believe about the product.6
If the associations are favorable, the resulting "halo effect" should not only influence customers' purchases, but it should also influence their...