It’s hard to differentiate yourself from the pack when it comes to promoting your business. But this restaurant in Beijing, China has taken personal branding pretty damn far by making customers solve complex math equations in order to find out how much their food costs. It’s almost enough to make you lose your appetite.
According to the Daily Mail, the restaurant’s prices are written as trigonometry equations on its menu that customers have to solve in order to know the price. Nothing says a fun time out at a restaurant more than learning how to deal with sines and cosines again, as well as having to break out the graphing calculator.
Naturally, customers have said that the menu has made them regress to when they had to learn trigonometry in school, with some claiming to get headaches and nightmares. Many felt so strongly about this forced math that they posted the menu to Chinese social media, which is a brilliant PR strategy on the restaurant’s part. Plus, the math equations may up the exclusive feel of the restaurant, or build anticipation for the dishes once people have figured out how much each costs.
For what it’s worth, the owner wrote a disclaimer on the bottom of the menu saying that he would reveal prices if people asked. And if the menu doesn’t change that much, you can probably memorize how much everything costs. At any rate, this will teach high school students to not complain about how the math they’re learning will never be useful in the real world.
And any publicity is good publicity. That math always adds up.
(Via Daily Mail)
