A Trick of the Light

For some reason (and I could make an educated guess) wine is a popular subject matter with psychologists looking to explore aspects of the way in which people are influenced without realising.

I referenced several of these fascinating studies in my book Consumer.ology: price, label design and music have all been shown to influence what people think of the same wine.

Now researchers in Germany have returned to the bottle to see if the colour of light in a room influences what people think about a wine.

As with all good studies the people taking part weren't being asked to make comparisons (which can produce results simply because the focus on comparing makes us imagine differences even when none exist). Instead different people were asked to taste the same wine in different settings and asked to say how much they liked the wine and what they would be prepared to pay for it.

With this approach, the reasonable statistical assumption is made that, provided people are assigned to different test conditions at random, a statistically similar average rating should be obtained if the altered variable makes no difference to what people think.

Importantly, by not telling them that anything has changed, researchers avoid the problem of causing people to focus on that aspect artificially. (Market researchers would do well to take heed of some of these principles when designing their own projects).

In this case they ambient light was changed: red, blue, green and white light were all compared.

The result? Red and blue ambient light caused people to rate the same wine more highly. Red light caused people to rate the wine as sweeter, fruitier and worth up to one Euro more than with other colours.

What's causing this impact is a matter for debate. One theory is that when we receive the environment to be more pleasant this is misattributed to the wine. Certainly, these types of misattribution have been found with other environmental influences.

Another possibility is that red primes people to think of popular, sweet fruits (like strawberries) and in doing so opens up the neural pathways to properties that are associated with these fruits and also regarded as positive traits in wine.

In practical terms, anyone with a retail environment or restaurant would do well to consider how the overall use of colour and light might be explored to create the most appealing environment for a particular range of products.

And, of course, we have another example of why conducting market research outside the contextual influences that shape consumer perceptions and behaviour is likely to lead to inaccurate results.

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Source: Daniel Oberfeld, Heiko Hecht, Ulrich Allendorf and Florian Wickelmaier. Ambient lighting modifies the flavor of wine. Journal of Sensory Studies, 2009; 24 (6): 797