Wendy's pricing snafu is a reminder of how hard these fast food chains try to optimize menu design.
McDonald's — which sells to ~1% of the world every day — did a digital menu redesign a few years ago and it boosted sales.
Here are 6 design psychology choices it made:
Background: In the mid-2010s, McDonald's sales were lagging. The brand turned it around with help of a multi-year menu & store redesign that:
◻️emphasized simplicity (sped up avg. drive thru time from 400 secs to 350 secs)
◻️highlights signature items (pricier = higher margins)
Here was McDonald's challenge: loyal customers love the classics (Big Mac, McChicken)
And spend only 30 secs on the menu (pushing them from defaults to a new items is hard)
But McDonald's sells 2B+ meals a month, so influencing choices for a small % of customers boosts profits.
Attention cues
Dynamic menus were the biggest change. While value items are typically static pics, signature items are animated.
Our peripheral vision specializes in detecting motion. Dynamic signature items capture our attention and can end up in our potential choice set.
Decision anchoring
First options are key in decision-making. In a study of buffets, 70% of eaters put one of the first 3 items on the plate.
Signature items are often the 1st thing you see. By highlighting them, they are pushing the higher-margin items into your choice set.
Optimized for working memory
Cognitively, humans can hold 5-9 "items" in our working memory at one time (e.g., 7-digit phone numbers).
McDonald's dynamic menus highlight 7-10 items. Naturally, the majority of the menu real estate emphasizes higher-margin items or combos.
Price anchoring
Even if *none* of the signature item nudges work, we've been exposed to the priciest items on McDonald's menu.
A subsequent purchase from regular (or value) menu will seem like more of a deal based on the price difference...leading to the perception of value.
The power of grouping images
Gestalt principles describe how humans perceive objects and one of them is pattern matching.
McDonald's often groups 3 similar images together of a single product category (usually Signatures) to create a "pattern" that captures our attention.
Experience chunking
Inside the restaurant, McDonald's separated the order and waiting lines.
The key here is that our perception of "waiting" is reduced vs. if it was a single line. Thus, our memory of the experience is that the wait "wasn't too long".
I tried to apply the same design philosophy to the research app.
But my co-founder yelled at me for spending $78,000 on a used McDonald’s drive-thru screen and asked “dude, wtf do we need that for?” (Fair point)Bearly.AI
Semi-related: a lot of fast food logos have the color red in them. Some research — which I have no idea if it’s true — suggests sight of the color can raise blood pressure and stimulate appetites: ion.uwinnipeg.ca/~ssingh5/x/col…
Regarding Wendy’s:
— Said in earnings it wanted to do “dynamic menu”
— This was interpreted as “surge pricing”
— Messaging was meant to be dynamic = discounts and deals
— Got accused of price gouging and exploiting customers
— Walked back the proposal
— So much meme fodder
The invention of bánh mì is a combination of climate, trade and urban layout of Saigon in late-19th century designed by French colonist.
When the French captured the area in 1859, most economic activity in the region took place along the Saigon river.
The population built makeshift homes tightly bundled by the river banks. Outgrowth from this eventually lead to narrow alleyways between many buildings that is trademark of the city (the Khmer named the region Prey Nokor then French renamed it Saigon and then it was renamed to Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 after end of Vietnam War).
Over decades, the French created European street grids and built wide Paris-type boulevards in the city to funnel commerce to larger markets (also make the city easier to administer).
It was at these markets that French baguettes were introduced and traded.
Bánh mì bread is known for being flaky and crispy on the outside while fluffier on inside (so god damn good).
Two features of Saigon helped create this texture:
▫️Climate: The heat and humidity in Southeast Asia leads dough to ferment faster, which creates air pockets in bread (light and fluffy).
▫️Ingredient: Wide availability of rice meant locals added rice flour to wheat flour imports (which were quite expensive). Rice flour is more resistant to moisture and creates a drier, crispier crust.
Fast forward to the 1930s: the French-designed street layout is largely complete. Now, the city centre has wide boulevards intersected by countless narrow alleyways.
The design was ideal for street vendor carts. These businesses were inspired by shophosue of colonial architecture to sell all types of goods as chaotic traffic rushed by.
Vietnam has some of the most slapping rice and soup dishes, but many people on the move in the mornings wanted something more portable and edible by hand.
Bánh mì was traditionally upper class fare but it met the need for on-the-go food.
Just fill the bread with some Vietnamese ingredients (braised pork, pickled vegetable, Vietnamese coriander, chilies) along with French goodies (pate).
Pair it with cà phê sữa đá (aka coffee with condensed milk aka caffeinated crack) and you’re laughing.
Haven’t lived in Saigon for 10+ years but ate a banh mi every other day when I did.
While there, I also sold a comedy script to Fox (pitch: “The Fugitive meets Harold & Kumar set in Southeast Asia”).
reminder that no “asian guy and stripper” story will ever top Enron Lou Pai’s “asian guy and stripper” story
Totally forgot Lou Pai got the stripper pregnant.
If this story was transplanted to 2020s, Pai would probably have been a whale on OnlyFans and gotten got…anyways, I wrote about the economics of OF here: readtrung.com/p/onlyfans-sti…
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) trained an AI slideshow maker called “Decker” on 900 templates and apparently gotten so popular that “some of its consultants are fretting about job security.”
Sorry, called “Deckster”. That excerpt was from this BI piece that also looked at McKinsey and Deloitte AI uses: businessinsider.com/consulting-ai-…
The Mckinsey chatbot is used by 70% of firm but same anonymous job board said it’s "functional enough" and best for "very low stakes issues." x.com/bearlyai/statu…
Here’s a r/consulting thread based on Computer World last year. Deckster was launched internally March 2024…some think it’s BS…some think it helps with cold start (B- quality): reddit.com/r/consulting/s…