Love is in the menu: Leveraging healthy restaurant brands with handwritten typeface
Introduction
Today's consumers are becoming increasingly health-conscious. They look for healthier and higher-quality foods when eating out, are drawn by descriptions such as “locally grown” “seasonal” and “superfood”, and show a greater demand for menus with fresh, nutritious, and sustainable options (The Hartman Group, 2015; The Mintel Group, 2016). As a result, the restaurant industry has witnessed an unprecedented rise of healthy restaurant brands (Garfield, 2018; Gasparro, 2017; Olayanju, 2018). Even Oprah Winfrey is investing in a healthy restaurant brand named True Food Kitchen. According to Fortune (2018), Winfrey was very impressed by the team's love and passion for healthy dining. Can a restaurant's menu offerings contain “love”? Love in this context can be defined as “a consumer's perception of an artisan's emotion of strong attraction and passionate attachment to the product and its production process” (p. 99; Fuchs, Schreier, & Van Osselaer, 2015). Can customers feel it? Will it generate any favorable brand-related outcomes?
The visual design aspect of the service experience has received increasing attention in marketing research (Foroudi, Melewar, & Gupta, 2014; Hagtvedt & Brasel, 2017; Hagtvedt & Patrick, 2008; Hwang, Shin, & Mattila, 2018; Liu, Bogicevic, & Mattila, 2018; Van Ittersum & Wansink, 2012; Wansink & Love, 2014). In this article, we offer an innovative visual design strategy to leverage consumer responses to healthy restaurant brands. Specifically, we focus on handwritten typeface, defined as printed typeface that appears to have been written by humans (Schroll, Schnurr, Grewal, Johar, & Aggarwal, 2018). For example, as part of the brand's makeover, Wendy's logo now adopts a more handwritten look (see the web appendix). Typefaces are ubiquitous in the marketplace, and previous research shows that typeface design affects brand perceptions (Magnini & Kim, 2016; Ren, Xia, & Du, 2018), brand associations (Hagtvedt, 2011; Jiang, Gorn, Galli, & Chattopadhyay, 2016), brand memorability (Childers & Jass, 2002; McCarthy & Mothersbaugh, 2002), and financial performance (Hertenstein, Platt, & Brown, 2001; Wallace, 2001). While machine-written typeface (e.g., Helvetica, Calibri, Geneva) is widely utilized in marketing communications, the competitive advantage of using handwritten typeface is not well understood by service marketers.
Drawing on the positive contagion effect (Argo, Dahl, & Morales, 2008; Fuchs et al., 2015), we argue that using handwritten (vs. machine-written) typeface in a menu enhances a sense of “human touch”, which subsequently triggers the perception that “love” is symbolically imbued in the restaurant's offerings. Perceiving the menu as containing love spills over to a series of brand-related outcomes including consumers' attitudes toward the menu, perceived healthiness of the brand, and social media engagement with the brand. In addition, we examine restaurant type (healthy vs. regular) as an important moderating factor, such that the favorable spillover effect of handwritten typeface is limited to brands with a health-focused positioning. Moreover, solo consumption has become ubiquitous in the service industry (Hwang et al., 2018; Ratner & Hamilton, 2015). In a follow-up study, we show that the handwritten typeface effect with healthy restaurants is robust in both social and solo dining contexts. Findings of this research highlight an innovative typeface strategy in fine-tuning consumer responses to healthy restaurant brands. A conceptual framework is provided in Fig. 1.
Section snippets
Healthy dining
In recent years, consumers are increasingly seeking healthier foods and dining options (National Restaurant Association, 2017). To meet the needs of today's health-conscious consumers, restaurants (e.g., McDonald's, Applebee's, Au Bon Pain) strive to create a healthier menu based on fresh, natural, nutritious, and sustainable ingredients. The restaurant industry has witnessed an inevitable trend where old brands are repositioning themselves to be healthy and new healthy restaurant brands are
Study design and sample
A 2 (typeface: handwritten vs. machine-written) × 2 (restaurant type: healthy vs. regular) between-subjects experimental design was used to test the hypotheses. A total of 185 U.S. adult consumers, recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk's consumer panel, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions. The sample was between the ages of 20 and 84 (M = 36.2), 53.5% of the respondents were male, 77.3% were Caucasian, 63.3% had a four-year college degree, and 62.6% earned more than
Study design and sample
Study 2 utilized a 2 (typeface: handwritten vs. machine-written) × 2 (dining party: solo vs. social) between-subjects experimental design. A total of 191 U.S. adult consumers, recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk's consumer panel, were randomly assigned to one of the four experimental conditions. The sample was between the ages of 21 and 77 (M = 36.8), 57.1% of the respondents were male, 74.3% were Caucasian, 71.3% had a four-year college degree, and 69.1% earned more than $40,000 annually.
Procedures and materials
General discussion
While the restaurant industry is witnessing an unprecedented rise of healthy restaurant brands (Garfield, 2018; Gasparro, 2017; Olayanju, 2018), the existing literature provides little guidance on how to leverage consumer responses to such brands. To address this gap, the present research examines a novel visual design strategy (i.e., using handwritten typeface in menus) that enhances consumer responses to healthy restaurant brands. Findings of this research demonstrate that using handwritten
Acknowledgment
The authors thank the Marriott Foundation for the funding of this research.
Stephanie Q. Liu, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Consumer Sciences at The Ohio State University. Her research examines consumer behavior and marketing strategies related to experiential consumption, with special interests in service encounter management, advertising, social media, and technology innovations.
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Stephanie Q. Liu, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Consumer Sciences at The Ohio State University. Her research examines consumer behavior and marketing strategies related to experiential consumption, with special interests in service encounter management, advertising, social media, and technology innovations.
Sungwoo Choi, M.S., is a Ph.D. candidate at the School of Hospitality Management at the Pennsylvania State University. His primary research interests focus on service encounter management, word-of-mouth communication, and technology innovations in the hospitality industry.
Anna S. Mattila, PhD, is a Marriott Professor of Lodging Management at The Pennsylvania State University. She holds a Ph.D. in services marketing from Cornell University. Her research interests focus on service encounters with a particular interest in service recovery, corporate social responsibility, social media and cross-cultural research.