What is a cool restaurant? Understanding, measuring, and leveraging coolness for restaurants

Abstract

Restaurants operate in competitive markets, forcing them to differentiate themselves. The use of coolness represents a novel tactic to do so. Although the literature has started to investigate coolness in people, brands, and cities, the complex nature of restaurants and their inherent human factor calls for further research on what makes restaurants cool. We conceptualize restaurant coolness and identify its constituent features empirically. We find that cool restaurants are original, authentic, welcoming, purposeful, and communal. We develop a parsimonious and reliable measure of restaurant coolness and show that restaurant coolness significantly influences relevant downstream variables related to consumers' attitudes and intentions (i.e., self-restaurant connection, trust, and emotional attachment). Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate that restaurant coolness can enhance restaurants’ service failure recovery, including attribution, failure management perception, recovery satisfaction, and forgiveness. Our findings reveal differentiating features of restaurant coolness compared to other contexts and that coolness has crucial implications for restaurants.