{"id":2346,"date":"2016-07-07T13:27:25","date_gmt":"2016-07-07T18:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/?p=2346"},"modified":"2016-07-07T13:27:34","modified_gmt":"2016-07-07T18:27:34","slug":"marketing-unplugged-madagascar-vanilla","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/marketing-unplugged-madagascar-vanilla\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing Unplugged: Madagascar Vanilla"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

\"vanilla<\/a><\/p>\n

Recently we dined at a local bistro, a casual spot\u00a0falling\u00a0comfortably between family dining and fine dining.\u00a0 Very straight forward entr\u00e9es –\u00a0 grilled rosemary chicken, grilled salmon, various pasta dishes \u2013 but I was confused by the description of the cr\u00e8me brul\u00e9e on the dessert menu – \u201cCreamy Madagascar vanilla bean topped with a layer of carmelized sugar.\u201d<\/p>\n

I know what cr\u00e8me brul\u00e9e is, and have always valued its crusty sugar giving way to its cool creamy mouth feel, but I was utterly perplexed by the Madagascar vanilla bean.\u00a0 What I was supposed to do with this additional information?\u00a0 Have I inadvertently consumed crap vanilla my entire life?\u00a0 Was my palate even sophisticated enough to detect the musty flavor of Madagascar wafting in from the Indian Ocean?\u00a0\u00a0 Should I be concerned that I am violating the principles of a locovore?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ah, wait a minute, I thought.\u00a0 Maybe Madagascar vanilla is just a marketing ploy.<\/p>\n

Once home, I rushed to consult the all-purpose answer machine \u2013 Wikipedia \u2013 and discovered that the most common source of vanilla is \u2013 Tah Dah! \u2013 Madagascar.<\/p>\n

So Madagascar vanilla is nothing more than the restaurant\u2019s feeble attempt to spice up the menu by adding an exotic birthplace to the commodity of vanilla.<\/p>\n

Beyond my pleasure at busting this pretentious description, I found myself fascinated by the related issue of menu psychology.\u00a0\u00a0 Basically a menu is nothing more than an ad with two purposes.\u00a0 When posted in the restaurant window it should lure diners through the door, and then once asses are in seats, the menu should ideally guide them to order the item with the highest profit margin.\u00a0 A decoy strategy includes a very high-priced option that will make everything else look cheap in comparison.\u00a0 At a rmeal at a more down scale family restaurant, I spotted a sure decoy.\u00a0 \u201cSteak classique\u201d was listed at $32, the price in larger and bolder type far exceeding the other modest entr\u00e9es.\u00a0 The role of the high-priced steak was to make the over-priced hamburgers look like a comparative bargain.<\/p>\n

Menu psychology has risen to the level of academia and has spawned the job niche of \u201cmenu engineer.\u201d\u00a0 In 2002 researcher Wansink and colleagues authored a frequently cited paper titled, \u201cHow Descriptive Menu Labels Influence Attitudes and Repatronage.\u201d\u00a0 The authors added descriptions to basic menus.\u00a0 There were four general categories \u2013 geographical (my Madagascar vanilla, but also food styles like Cajun, Tex-Mex, etc), sensory (savory, succulent, indulgent), nostalgia (Grandma\u2019s own) and preparation (hand-crafted, slowly steamed, hand-carved).\u00a0 The added descriptions increased sales by 27% and improved diners\u2019 attitudes.\u00a0 Descriptive menus have taken off since then.\u00a0 Certainly there have been times when I have suppressed giggles as the server reels off every last ingredient including each flake of kale or stray anise seed.<\/p>\n

I took another look at the bistro menu with these strategies in mind.\u00a0 Clearly the restaurant had embraced the concept of descriptive menus.\u00a0 There were no unadorned nouns, all had further descriptions calling on sensory, nostalgia and of course geographical adjectives – the panna cotta came with a macerated berry sauce, the tiramisu was succulent, the chocolate sauce was drizzled, the bread pudding was a comforting classic.<\/p>\n

However, as a newly minted menu engineer, I would suggest a few minor revisions.<\/p>\n

The bread pudding was also described as oven-warmed, which immediately set off alarms.\u00a0 Yes, I implicitly knew that the pudding had been prepared beforehand, but the menu now forced be to confront the fact that it could have been cooked days ago, or even frozen from Costco, and now was being rehabbed for dessert.\u00a0 The only positive message from this oven-warmed description was that the restaurant still valued the hominess of an oven over the convenience of a microwave.<\/p>\n

And then there was the chocolate fondant, described as a high-quality dark chocolate cake.\u00a0 This attribute falls outside the standard sensory descriptions of chocolate as \u201cindulgent\u201d or \u201cdecadent\u201d or \u201cdeath by chocolate.\u201d \u00a0My basic premise is that a restaurant should not need to reassure its diners of the quality of the ingredients.\u00a0 In fact the compulsion to identify the chocolate as high-quality reminded me of Richard Nixon\u2019s campaign blunder in insisting \u201cI am not a crook,\u201d which only led people to believe that he was, in fact, a crook.\u00a0 I took a pass on dessert.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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  Recently we dined at a local bistro, a casual spot\u00a0falling\u00a0comfortably between family dining and fine dining.\u00a0 Very straight forward entr\u00e9es –\u00a0 grilled rosemary chicken, grilled salmon, various pasta dishes \u2013 but I was confused by the description of the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[30,39,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food-stuff","category-marketing-unplugged","category-what-words-mean"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVc8-BQ","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2350,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2346\/revisions\/2350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fanagrams.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}