What is a Digital Menu Board?

The dictionary says a menu is: "A list of available options, especially as displayed on a screen."

A Digital Menu Board is that list displayed on a board or panel digitally or electronically.

To fully understand what a Digital Menu Board is you have to start with its roots. Menus have been around for about 1,000 years. These allowed merchants to provide information about their wares in a list so that people could be attracted to their shop or cart at a glance.

There are two ways for someone to interact with a classic menu board. First, they either know what the item is and can then approach the merchant if they are interested in that item. Or they don't know what it is and can ask the merchant about the item. Either way the hope is that a conversation about an item or service is started because of its placement on a list of 'wares'.

A menu in essence is a passive approach at up-selling in its simplest form. Without the menu, an item has to be specifically and intentionally brought up and talked about by either the merchant or the consumer. Until the conversation is had about that item there can not be commerce. With a menu, commerce can be initiated before a conversation is ever had.

A Digital Menu Board takes this a step further by allowing you to not only list your services, but to also passively have the conversation the merchant would offer without having to physically engage in conversation. Your wares are listed, but also explained and 'pushed'. This takes the role of the menu board into more of an action which should (and does) result in additional effectiveness.

The biggest downside to a classic menu board is its reliance on the consumer 'knowing' what a service is and therefore it's value. In the past for example, listing that you had 'salt' on your menu served well since everyone knew what salt was and what function it served and therefore could assign a value to your item and your offering price at a glance.

Modern day automotive shops menus are full of services that are complex and obscure to the typical consumer. Most people have a basic understanding of what shocks are, but don't understand their importance or the effect of worn out shocks on their performance and safety of their vehicle. A majority of consumers know what a radiator is, but not how it functions or its role in a vehicle, nor do they understand what a radiator flush does for them or why it's worth what you have it listed for on your menu.

Fact is, a menu's list of services in an automotive shop no longer performs it's basic function of up-selling because it's impossible to list items that everyone inherently understands. In modern day auto shops the initiation of commerce is falling squarely on the shoulders of the service writer. And let's face it, a service writer can't bring up every service to every customer every time no matter how good they are or how much time they have.

A Digital Menu Board with impactful educational content is the only way you can get back to the fundamentals of what a menu is and have it serve its base function. Up-selling your services passively. This is accomplished by fixing the error in the old menu styles. 

When you list radiator flush and have a video next to it that shows what a radiator is, how it integrates to the car, its function and what flushing gives the consumer. Now that consumer can view your menu, your video, your price and assign value on the spot. Based on that knowledge they make a decision on whether or not that is something that would be good for them. Initiating commerce passively for you and providing better over-all service and experience. Just like the classic menu used to do for merchants a 1,000 years ago.

In the end, a Digital Menu Board lets you accomplish what you were trying to do with your regular classic menu board. But where your classic menu board failed. Your Digital Menu Board won't, our studies prove it.