Losing meaning: Meaningless terms and consumers

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Imagine the scene. You enter a restaurant, sit down and open the menu. Two options jump out at you. The first, steak, chips and bearnaise sauce. The other, wild orecchiette with invigorated aubergine sliders and market sungold. There is a good chance that your order would come medium-rare.

Meaningless terms are littered across the restaurant trade and are commonplace in numerous other industries too, as a way of showcasing premium products or making them more enticing to customers. A recent study examined the impact these terms have on products’ success, and found that in many cases they were actually off-putting to the majority of people.

The paper, Meaningless Descriptors Increase Price Judgments and Decrease Quality Judgments, examines the difference between ‘meaningful’ product descriptions (those that provide clear semantic meaning or context) and ‘meaningless’ descriptions (which are not understood by consumers either in isolation or in context) on potential customers’ price judgements and subjective quality expectations.

Ernest Baskin, co-author of the study and researcher at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, says the genesis for the research came from a visit to a restaurant. “We were looking at various items on restaurant menus, and how they were named,” he laughs. “We were talking about how we are relatively educated people, but we had no idea what some of the menu items were. We got to thinking ‘OK, if we don’t know what some of these items are, many other people probably also don’t know what these items mean’.

“We thought this might be a cool project to study, where we look at words on menus that you do not already know what they mean and how they affect your perception of the restaurant and the dish.”

The research team carried out four experiments to examine the impact of meaningless terms.

The first saw 299 participants randomly assigned to two groups, one examining a random meaningless descriptor added to a staple food, and a control just including the staple food term. The next experiment had 202 participants and examined the use of random meaningless descriptors in four non-food everyday items:a ballpoint pen, a neck pillow, hand soap and facial tissues.

The third experiment had 203 participants and asked each to evaluate both fried chicken and a glazed doughnut, with one group provided an additional randomly generated meaningless term before the item, for example, ‘zal-fried chicken’. All participants were asked whether they associated each meaningless descriptor with any positive or negative meaning and asked to give them a numerical rating.

The final experiment saw 402 participants asked to think of a friend who is either very unconventional or very conventional, and then to imagine buying a bakery gift certificate for them based on the description of a glazed donut, some of which included meaningless descriptors.

The results broadly showed that when meaningless terms were used, people thought the item would be more expensive. However, they also thought the item would be of a lower quality than products with more straightforward and easily understood descriptions.

“In the restaurant industry, there is this overall idea that if you make something sound cool and untypical, that is automatically going to, in all cases, be better for your restaurant,” says Baskin. “This research shows that is not always the case. In many cases, when you see an item on a menu, and you don’t really know what it is, based on an adjective, you think it might be more expensive and that it might not be an item for you. That might even prevent you from going to the restaurant to experience the item.”

The trend is primarily seen among utilitarian items that are commonly known, such as fried chicken or a ballpoint pen. Complicated additional terminology that the consumer does not recognise risks making them imagine a weird version of the commonplace product. “They are unlikely to like it,” Baskin adds.

However, this might not be applicable to every industry – technology is an area where numerous terms that are alien to the average consumer are in everyday parlance. The research paper suggests that technology is one area where meaningless descriptors might increase price judgements without decreasing quality expectations or hurting purchase intentions.

Much depends on the target audience.

The research suggests that complicated and uncommon terms will not work with a broader customer base. People do not have the ability to taste a product before going to a restaurant, and often have to judge a location based on the information contained in the menu. More bizarre names might therefore not be the best strategy, depending on the likely customer base.

“It really depends on the segment you are targeting,” argues Baskin. “You can succeed as a restaurant targeted towards a high-end foodie. They will be familiar with the terminology, and it doesn’t necessarily put them off.

“The key comes when you need your audience to be a little bit broader, and you want to bring in folks who are not ensconced in foodie culture and are less likely to know what these words mean. That is the dilemma the restaurants are in.”

Outside the food industry, the research raises the question of how language is used to describe products, and whether simpler wording could be more effective at showcasing an item’s quality to its intended audience. Baskin says that the next steps are to consider other types of descriptors, and the impact they could have – for example, how language and linguistics in marketing can affect product success and desirability.

“Language is really important, and you need to know whether people are going to understand what it is you are trying to sell them,” says Baskin. “If they don’t understand, they are going to make assumptions. This work says that if they don’t understand at all and have no associations, they will make negative assumptions.” It appears that for many consumers, simplicity is key – if your product is good, do not overcomplicate. The classic dishes and descriptions are often ‘classic’ for a reason.

Ernest Baskin, Peggy J. Liu, Meaningless Descriptors Increase Price Judgments and Decrease Quality Judgments, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Volume 31, Issue 2, April 2021

THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE OCTOBER 2021 ISSUE OF IMPACT.