In recent years, management in restaurant industry has found itself in an extremely harsh environment and faces the important challenge of finding out how to attract consumers. It is assumed that ways to attract consumers to restaurants are to create attractive and individualistic restaurants and menus. From this context, we previously proposed models (Kwon and Yamashita 2014, Kwon 2015) that analyzes the influence restaurant menu design, the menu profile and the messages it carries have to consumers’ selection behavior. On the other hand, the emotional state of consumers somehow impacts their own decision making and actions.
In this study, we focused on consumers’ emotional state (both positive and negative) and analyze the effect the consumers’ emotional state has on their menu selection behavior and the impact that it has on how the messages (fuzzy message) are received. To achieve this, we first evoke certain feelings to test subjects by applying of different set of stimulus. For positive feedback, we play music to the test subjects. For negative feedback, we expose the subjects to a noise source. Next, we conduct a questionnaire on the attractiveness of the restaurant menu using the menu profile designed by the L8(27) type orthogonal array of the experimental design method and an analysis will be done using data collected from this survey.