Food, psychology, science and social media recently in a unique experiment from Artizian Catering and Digital Blonde, designed to explore the relationship between social media and food.
With so many images of food shared and engaged with each day online, the experiment sought to understand how these reactions, emotions and experiences compared to the real thing. Food themed social media content can receive such high levels of engagement, seemingly generating very real emotions of desire, happiness and surprise – could these come close to, or be as powerful as the real-life experience of eating food?
Experiencing dishes on and offline – how does it compare?
The experiment saw guests treated to a series of dishes each designed to provoke different emotions. The guests were asked to rate and record their emotions both before and after tasting each dish. This data was then collated and compared with an online study, where participants who had not been at the dinner recorded their emotions after viewing images of the Artizian dishes.
To give a further comparison, two separate versions of the online survey were distributed; one displaying only the food images and one showing both the food images and a description of the dish.
The Result: #FoodPorn doesn’t compare to the real thing
A Social Media Week panel event unveiled the experiment’s findings, including:
Storytelling provokes a stronger emotional response: the results showed conclusively that people’s emotional reactions to the dishes were stronger offline, averaging a sore of 3.6. This fell to 2.7 for people viewing only the images online, and interestingly increased to 3.0 for people who view the images accompanied by a description of the dish. Adding descriptions to the online images also increased participants feelings of desire, disgust and surprise and made food appear more appetising than the images alone.
Ultimately, the research highlighted there was no substitute for multi-sensory experience of eating food. While images of food receive high levels of engagement online and food with descriptions even more so, feelings and emotions were heightened across the spectrum when it came to actually eating the food.
So – what can chefs and foodservice do with the findings?
Below, Digital Blonde details practical ideas and advice that chefs and those in the industry can take away from the research findings. There are 9 points that can be put into practice:
- The research highlighted that different dishes trigger different emotions and certain emotions are more likely to encourage people to share. For example, a dish that caused surprise was more likely to encourage someone to share than disgust or fear.
The stronger an emotion, whatever that may be, the more likely it is to create a share. To encourage more people to talk about their food on and offline, chefs need to consider emotions when planning their menus. Dishes that create surprise are most likely to be talked about, whether that’s online or through word of mouth. Think about how you can add some surprise to your dish, or how it’s served.
- This experiment explored emotions both offline and online. When people see food images online they are more likely to have a neutral reaction, not positive or negative, than if they were to experience it in real life. Whilst this may sound obvious as only one sense is being used, it’s confirmed how much harder the industry has to work to create emotions from food images and descriptions alone.
- When a description was added to a food photo it increased the strength of emotion. The research showed that, when an emotion was felt strongly, diners were more likely to share. How do you ensure your diners are adding the correct descriptions to their photos? Many restaurants remove menus when orders have been placed which could lead to inaccurate descriptions. Chefs should consider leaving menus on tables for longer so diners have accurate and complete descriptions of the dishes. Alternatively, they could give diners something to take away so they have all the details if posting online later.
- Storytelling is a great way of increasing emotion. Make sure your waiters are fully briefed on each of the dishes. Little snippets of information are more likely to get people to share as it will strengthen an emotion. People will also remember these stories when they leave and share them with others.
- Stories about the dishes could be related to provenance, sustainability or another interesting fact about the ingredients. This kind of story is more likely to trigger a stronger emotion when thinking about the dish before and after eating.
- Do you have pictures of your dishes on your website? By adding a description to these images you can create more of an emotion than simply having a photo.
- When it comes to consumer generated content, do you encourage people to share your photos instead of phone camera shots so they are of the quality you need to capture the full presentation of your dish?
- Are you monitoring what people are saying about their experience of dining with you? Are there some dishes that more people talk about than others? Studying these photos and comments is the best piece of market research you never commissioned. Look at the most shareable dishes and make notes on why you think they were the most talked about to help with future menu creations.
- Previous research carried out by Digital Blonde and The Web Psych highlighted that 65% of diners are likely to share a food image whilst still at the table. This is your opportunity to ensure the message put out is what you’d want diners to say. Have you considered offering diners high quality food images? Are your waiters trained to tell stories? Do your front of house teams ensure every diner had a positive experience before they leave? Whilst the diner is still in your restaurant you have more opportunity to influence what they post online, so make the most of the opportunity.
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