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. Therefore, we analyzed the menu selection behavior of consumers in positive and negative emotional states.
This study focuses on consumers’ emotional states (nostalgic feeling) and analyzes the effect that consumers’ emotional states have on their menu selection behavior, along with the impact that this has on how messages (fuzzy messages) are received. To achieve this, we first test subjects by evoking nostalgic feeling through the application of stimuli. Next, we conduct a questionnaire on the attractiveness of a restaurant menu using the menu profile designed by the L8(27) type orthogonal array of the experimental design method, and analyze the collected data.