Exploring the role of physical evidences on the consumers' restaurant preferences: A qualitative research

Physical evidences became an important field of study as a result of the restaurants growing interest in creating artificial environments for customers different experiences. Therefore in this research the effects of the elements such as; facility aesthetics, lighting, design, food related equipment, personell and atmosphere on customers is evaluated as a whole. In this qualitative research observation and interviewing has been made with the restaurants which have tourism certificates and municipality certificates in Eskişehir. In the process of observations 18 subthemes are attained with the thematic analyses conducted with four restaurants. Subthemes that are attained from observations are used as a base of the questions of the interviewing process. In the interviewing process, there are 15 participants choosen by snowball technique. In order to get a maximum level of data from the participants they are asked to chose the restaurants by themselves. Thus, the reason why participants chose the restaurants and which physical features stand out would be possible to determine. Microanalysis, open coding and selective coding revealed that the physical evidences such as; colour, music, hygene, personel and menu functions as a whole in the mind of participants and evaluated with in this whole. Also location and the other customers are determined as needed to be in the dinescape scale and it is seen that negative situations can be tolarated in the case of nominal effects of physical evidences on customers are positive.