A restaurant in Manhattan charges $65 for a steak. Nobody blinks.
The same cut of meat at the same quality in a casual chain? $28, and people complain it's expensive.
The difference isn't the steak. It's the menu.
Restaurants figured out decades ago that how you present options matters more than the options themselves. Menu engineering -- the deliberate design of choices to steer customers toward higher-margin items -- can increase profits by 10-15%, with some operations reporting sales gains up to 27% (Toast).
Athletic directors are selling the same thing restaurants are: an experience. But most athletics departments price like they're running a spreadsheet, not a menu.
Here's what restaurants know that ADs don't.
The Decoy Effect: Why Nobody Chose the Middle Option
In Dan Ariely's famous Economist experiment, students were given three subscription options:
- Online only: $59
- Print only: $125
- Print + online: $125
Nobody chose the middle option. Zero percent. But 84% chose the combo -- because the print-only option made it look like a steal.
Remove the decoy? Only 32% chose the combo. Same product, same price. Different frame. The decoy shifted preference by 52 percentage points.
ConversionXL found the same pattern in digital pricing: implementing a decoy option can increase conversion to higher-tier plans by up to 30%.
Now think about how most athletics departments price season tickets.
General admission: $150
Reserved: $300
Premium: $800
Three clean options. Logical. And completely missing the psychology.
What if you added a fourth:
General admission: $150
Reserved: $300
Reserved + parking: $325
Premium (includes parking + priority entry): $800
The "reserved + parking" option at $325 makes the jump from $300 feel trivial -- you're getting parking for $25. But it also reframes the $800 premium tier. The buyer's brain is now anchoring against incremental value, not sticker price.
Restaurants don't just sell food. They engineer decisions.
Anchoring: The $500 Bottle Effect
Every wine list has a bottle nobody's supposed to buy. The $500 Burgundy exists to make the $85 Pinot Noir feel reasonable.
This is anchoring -- the first price you see becomes your reference point for everything after. When a menu leads with high-priced items, the mid-range options sell better. Strategic placement in the upper-right and center of menus can raise revenue on featured items by up to 35%.
Most sponsorship decks do the opposite. They start with the cheapest tier and work up.
Bronze: $5,000
Silver: $15,000
Gold: $50,000
The prospect anchors on $5,000. Everything else feels expensive.
Flip it:
Presenting Partner: $150,000
Championship Tier: $50,000
Season Tier: $15,000
Game Day Tier: $5,000
Now $50,000 feels like a deal. The $150,000 option is the $500 wine bottle. You don't need anyone to buy it -- you need it to exist.
The Bundle Trap (and How to Escape It)
Restaurants bundle strategically. The prix fixe isn't just convenient -- it's profitable. A three-course meal at $45 costs less than ordering each course separately ($18 + $16 + $14 = $48), but the restaurant's food cost on the prix fixe is lower because they control what goes in it.
Athletics departments bundle too, but often without strategy. "Family four-pack" sounds like a discount. And it is -- for the buyer. But does it increase total revenue per fan, or just give away margin?
The restaurant approach: bundle items with different margin profiles. Pair a high-margin appetizer with a lower-margin entree. The customer perceives value. The restaurant protects margin.
For athletics: bundle a mid-tier season ticket with a merchandise credit and an exclusive behind-the-scenes event. The ticket is your entree. The merch credit costs you $15 in product but the fan perceives $40 in value. The event costs almost nothing but feels exclusive.
You're not discounting. You're engineering perceived value while protecting actual margin.
Menu Categories: Stars, Plowhorses, Puzzles, and Dogs
Menu engineering classifies every item into four quadrants:
- Stars: High profit, high popularity. Promote them.
- Plowhorses: Low profit, high popularity. Reengineer them.
- Puzzles: High profit, low popularity. Reposition them.
- Dogs: Low profit, low popularity. Cut them.
Most athletics departments have never categorized their inventory this way.
What's your star? Maybe it's the premium parking pass -- high margin, everybody wants it. Promote it harder. What's your puzzle? Maybe it's the sideline experience package -- great margin, but buried on page 4 of the website. Reposition it.
What's your dog? That $10 general parking that costs you $8 in labor and signage? Kill it or restructure it.
The restaurant industry obsesses over this matrix. Athletics departments set prices once a year and move on.
The "Menu Engineer" Mindset
Here's the real takeaway. Restaurants don't just set prices -- they design choice architectures. Every placement, every font size, every "chef's recommendation" badge is deliberate.
Athletics departments have the same levers:
- Website ticket pages are your menu. What's the first thing visitors see?
- Sponsorship decks are your wine list. Where does the eye land first?
- Merch displays (physical and digital) are your dessert cart. What's positioned at eye level?
The restaurant industry didn't get better at cooking to increase profits by 10-15%. They got better at presenting what they already had.
Athletics departments don't need new inventory. They need a better menu.
One Thing to Try This Week
Pull up your ticket page or your sponsorship deck. Look at the order of options. Ask yourself: what am I anchoring my buyer to?
If the cheapest option is first, you're doing it backwards.
Bill Riesner is CEO of Vonga, where the team studies how sports organizations turn existing assets into revenue infrastructure.