Study finds saturation in images is key to marketing menu items:
An appealing photo of a pizza or other menu item can help a restaurant increase sales – especially if the right filter is used, a new study suggests.
Photos high in color saturation make food look fresher and tastier to viewers, which increases their willingness to order the menu items, researchers found.
Color saturation refers to the intensity of the color in the image – the vividness and richness of the reds and greens and blues.
But how well color saturation works to make food appealing depends on the visual distance of the food in the photo – and even on whether consumers plan to dine alone or with others.
[...] "On Instagram, it means using the 'X-Pro II' filter on your food photos rather than the 'Earlybird' filter," Liu said. "It is not difficult and doesn't cost a dime, so it is an easy win for restaurant marketers."
[...] The food in the more highly saturated photos looked fresher and tastier to participants, and that led them to be more likely to purchase the food, results showed.
But color saturation had a stronger effect when the food appeared more distant in the photos, Liu said.
"When the food is shown close up, it is already easy for the viewers to imagine how fresh and tasty the food would be," she said. "Color saturation is not as necessary."
[...] "Restaurants have to post pictures of their food on social media and online ordering platforms," she said.
"They should be paying as much attention, or maybe more, to the photos they post as they do to the text. Color saturation is one key element they need to focus on."
Journal Reference:
Stephanie Q. Liu, Laurie Luorong Wu, Xi Yu, and Huiling Huang, Marketing online food images via color saturation: A sensory imagery perspective, J Bus Res, 151, 2002. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2022.06.061
(Score: 5, Informative) by mcgrew on Friday August 12 2022, @01:27PM (3 children)
"A study"? I learned that in art school half a century ago. Also that half the time they're not even photos, they're color drawings, and the actual photos are often not of real food. Fakes can very often look better and more real than the real thing. Take Disney World. Those bushes trimmed to look like animals that look like they can't be real bushes? Real bushes. Meanwhile, the ones that look real are fake.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 12 2022, @04:03PM (2 children)
Art imitates life?
Do you want the rich deep red strawberry or the pale pink one?
Do you want the deep green lettuce on your burger, or would you prefer the faded white-green stuff?
Are blueberries better when they're pale, or when they are a deep even dark blue?
When comparing two glasses of orange juice, are you going to go for the richly colored orange one, or the watery looking one?
I'm sure there are exceptions, particularly in cooked or processed foods, but that's not where the evolutionary instincts were developed, they were developed while foraging in the wild.
Yet another thing that sucks about getting old and losing your eyesight (particularly to obscuring phenomena like cataracts): everything looks less appealing, except your and your old friends' skin, at least you can't see the wrinkles.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday August 13 2022, @08:12PM (1 child)
Get CrystaLenses for the cataracts. Not only will they cure the cataract, they cure nearsightedness, farsightedness (including age-related presbyopia) and astigmatism. You'll focus like a young man. However, you'll still need contrast; that's a geezer thing that's the retinas and brain rather than lenses.
Medicare covers all but $1000 per lens, as they're still under patent until next year. I have one in my left eye; best grand I ever spent.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday August 13 2022, @08:46PM
That's probably what's coming, along with lasik, but the cataract isn't too bad yet and I'm curious how the lens softening eye drops are going to develop after market release...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Informative) by srobert on Friday August 12 2022, @03:34PM (1 child)
Seems like the restaurant industry benefits more from efforts to make the food look good in ads than they do from making good food. That burger looks pretty good in the ad. In reality it's looks and tastes like garbage.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 12 2022, @04:05PM
This is surely somehow related to the phenomena where new restaurants attract much larger crowds than existing / established restaurants.
For a while (maybe still) there was a pizza place in town that would change their name every 6 months, basically to dodge all the negative Yelp reviews and similar.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 3, Flamebait) by SomeGuy on Friday August 12 2022, @06:03PM
I can't even remember the last time an advertisement was even halfway honest about their product.
A picture of a tasty looking food item? Yea, you KNOW you are going to get a shriveled, rotten, nasty product that will likely make you sick. They never use actual roadkill in the Domino's Pizza ads. :P
Sad thing is, consumertards stay so brainwashed, they will always believe the advertisements. Even after they buy their moldy icky product and have to get their stomachs pumped.
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday August 12 2022, @10:32PM
I think the same goes with cookbooks. So often I follow the recipes exactly but mine comes out mostly grey or brown, not the intense red or yellow as in the photo.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday August 12 2022, @11:07PM
Per my understanding, regulations require that food ads must actually show the food. There are of course lots of tricks used to make the food look more appealing (motor oil instead of syrup for pancake ads, cardboard spacers to make burgers look plumper). With digital editing however where's the limit?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snospar on Saturday August 13 2022, @11:05AM
I think this is pretty much taken for granted, I mean every photo of a burger from any of the big chains (e.g. McDonald's, Burger King, KFC) will look fantastic and absolutely nothing like the thing that greets you when you open the box.
One exception, my local Chinese Take Away has photos in the menu that actually looks the same as the food when it arrives. Weirdly the food in the photos doesn't look great, I suppose they haven't bothered to doctor them, but the food is always excellent.
(Score: 2) by Lester on Saturday August 13 2022, @04:54PM
It's appalling how many ways are there to manipulate us, and even more appealing learning that they are devoting more and more resources to find new ways and improve the old ones.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday August 13 2022, @07:13PM
A new study has found that the Pope is a Catholic.