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If you’re planning to open a pub (or if you already have one), remember to use blue or red lights and to turn up the music volume. The reason? Your customers will appreciate beer more and drink more. Yes, this sounds like a joke, but those are the conclusions, made easier, drawn from separate studies on how environmental factors can influence the choices of pub customers.

Have you ever thought that was the light that influence your perception, and therefore your judgment, on a certain beer? Not me, yet the results of a German research show the opposite. As reported by Stephen Beaumont on his blog, the Johannes Gutenberg University’s Institute of Psychology in Mainz has found that a single bottle of wine (and therefore presumably beer) is evaluated differently if it is exposed to light of a given color rather than another.

Basing on the answers of the 500 participants to this survey it was specifically found that a bottle illuminated by a red or blue light is considered to be better than when exposed to a white or green light. It seems that cold colors “cools” consumers’ assessments. Moreover customers would be willing to spend up to a dollar more for the bottles illuminated in red and blue.

That eyes can easily influence our purchasing decisions is not a novelty, and marketing experts know that. But that also the music is a key element in determining our behavior in the pub was more difficult to predict. The two studies (one French and one Scottish) quoted by Jay Brooks on his site shown this. In detail, the amount of beer drunk in the premises is directly proportional to the music volume.

The Scottish research reveals that from 72dB (comparable to the noise of traffic on a busy road) to 88db (as if you had a lawnmowers near you), the average time to finish a drink decreases from 14.5 minutes to 11.5 minutes, with the result that during one evening each customer would drink one beer more.

Far from being satisfactory, the most immediate explanation is that the difficulty of interpersonal communication (due to noise) lead customers to focus more on their drinks and less on people. But as Brooks points out, the loud music could simply creates greater levels of arousal, which then leads to more drinking. These are curious and interesting results by the way, which once again explain to us how many hidden parameters come into play when we make our choices, even when limited to the mere consumption of a beer. If someday you’ll enter in a pub with loud music and a strange blue light, you’ll know what the publican is aiming to .