As modern consumers have been exposed to material affluence and various information, their lifestyle and values have changed. The importance of differentiation strategy has been highlighted along with food service industry getting commercialized, enla...
As modern consumers have been exposed to material affluence and various information, their lifestyle and values have changed. The importance of differentiation strategy has been highlighted along with food service industry getting commercialized, enlarged, and specialized. Dining restaurants have tried various, innovative management techniques to meet customers and paid more attention to change store atmosphere to satisfy customer sensibility. Menu could satisfy various customer requirements and be used as the biggest marketing tool to appeal foods available in the store to customers at once.
Specifically focusing on the Model of Gaze Movement by William Doerfler, the study on the menu had been introduced in the field without enough academic verification over 30 years and most of them had collected data from survey immediately after checking out the menu in the restaurant.
The data collected in that way tended to rely on research participant’s memory and more likely to be distorted. Thus, it’s necessary to collect data through quantitative method to fix errors.
Therefore, the purpose of this study was to thoroughly analyze which direction the gaze moves toward when the customers look menu first time using Eye tracker, verify the Model of Gaze Movement by William Doerfler and analyze position where catches the gaze the most frequently while focusing on how to induce customers to select strategic product.
In this study, the menu from top dining restaurants based on number of stores provided by Korea Fair Trade Commission was set as visual stimuli in order to collect and analyze characteristics of consumer’s gaze movement when they watch the menu. A total of 55 university students with different majors participated in the eye-tracking experiment and they filled out questionnaires immediately after the experiment and also, post-hoc test was carried out on it.
Eye-tracking data was used to identify observation characteristics on the menu using BeGaze 3.0 program by SMI with AOIs Gridded AOIs. Questionnaire data was processed using SPSS 25 to carry out frequency, factor, reliability analysis, one way Anova, Chi-Square Test and PCA to discover difference in gaze movement depending on the observation characteristics on the menu.
Research participants consisted of men (33.3%) and women (66.7%) and the characteristics of dining type was as follows: Over 5 times a month (72.9%), 4 times (8.3%), 3 times (8.3%), 2 times (6.3%) and 1 time (4.2%).
Results of eye-tracking experiment showed that after classifying the data of watching each visual stimulus into interested area, the observation characteristics varied by number of menu panel through the data on Fixation, Gridded AOIs, Dwell time.
When diving the characteristics of number of fixing eyes into 5 sec, it’s discovered that the research participants were likely to see name and price in 「0-5 sec」 before deciding the menu. And in「55-60 sec」, they were likely to see description or pictures, which indicates they were likely to see description to decide the menu and increase understanding in the menu. But in the three-sided menu, they were likely to see the name in 「55-60 sec」.
When making lattice on menu with different panels and analyzing accumulated time and numbers, the movement of visual attention over time was vertical generally in each visual stimulus and there was no difference in the direction of visual attention in the menu with different panels. When comparing the eye-tracking experiment data with regard to observation characteristics and selection attribute and questionnaire analysis data, it appeared that research participants thought the price is important in choosing the menu and it took much shorter time to acquire price information compared to other interested areas.
This study verified existing model by making detailed analysis of menu, ranging from research on menu, especially focusing on qualitative analysis including the survey, to eye-tracking experiment of quantitative analysis. In addition, it discovered that customers’ menu decision varied by selection attribute rather than position attributes. However, since this study was carried out with three types of menus with different panels, targeting university students, it’s considerably difficult to be applied to various restaurants and there’s clear limitation in suggesting suitable model that fits situation. Therefore, it’s required to conduct study by refining types of restaurants to objectify these research findings and apply to the field. It’s expected to see future studies analyze sales performance, frequency of menu displayed in the kiosk menu and interested area in order to verify research findings again.