An interesting story appeared in the Washington Post last year. A man stood in the metro station near the top of the escalators on a cold January morning in Washington DC and started to play the violin. He played six Bach pieces for 43 minutes. While he played 1097 people passed by. He had his violin case open and by the end had collected $32.17. And that includes the twenty-dollar bill thrown in by the only person that recognized him.

This was not your typical street performer. The violinist dressed in jeans and a baseball cap was Joshua Bell, who just three nights before gave a sold out performance at Boston Symphony Hall with seats going for more than $100. He was playing some of the most challenging, yet elegant classical music ever written. And Bell was playing it all on his 300-year-old Stradivari violin, conservatively estimated at $3.5 million.

The stunt was organized by the Washington Post as a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities. c Do we recognize talent in an unexpected context? In the 43 minutes the virtuoso played, only six people stopped and listened for a moment. About 20 gave him money but most continued to walk at their normal pace. Interestingly, kids seem to be the most attracted, but were invariably hurried along by their parents.

There’s may be more than one conclusion to draw from the experiment, but the most obvious to me is that your perception has a huge impact on how you value what you receive. As the Washington Post said, Joshua Bell “was, in short, art without a frame. We shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby as unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.” Are you expecting to receive something valuable in that situation? No. There’s no stage, no sold-out tickets or formal clothes. There’s no supporting cast. There’s no expectation that you will be getting the performance of your life.

Knowing that Joshua Bell was a onetime child prodigy and now an internationally acclaimed virtuoso makes it painful to watch the video. The hundreds of people hurrying to work are oblivious to the value of what they are passing. But the minute you change the perception of what they are getting, by changing the context, suddenly the same people are lining up to pay a $100 a seat.

The connection to brand perception is obvious. Set the stage. Change the expectation. Create the experience. The result will be higher value on what it is that you deliver.

The October issue of the business magazine Fast Company, is the annual look at the “Masters of Design” –the designers, companies and ideas that are driving creative capital in corporations today. What neuroscience reveals about how we come up with new ideas is explained in an article titled “Rewiring the Creative Mind”, excerpted below.

“Creativity and imagination begin with perception. Neuroscientists have come to realize that how you perceive something isn’t simply a product of what your eyes and ears transmit to your brain. It’s a product of your brain itself,” says Gregory Berns, the author of the article adapted from his book Iconoclast. Some people see things differently. Literally. Creative people may be born that way, but we all can learn how to see things not for what they are, but for what they might be.

“Perception and imagination are linked because the brain uses the same neural circuits for both functions. Imagination is like running perception in reverse. The reason it’s so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the brain interprets signals from your eyes. The images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. Visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations, the brain’s way of explaining ambiguous visual signals in the most likely way. And the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.”

“That’s the secret behind the famous illusion above, by the Italian psychologist Mario Puzo. Theories of how the brain works say the perception that the lines are different in length comes from experience. In the real world, lines that converge at the top are generally parallel, but are receding into the distance. Railroad tracks, roads, and skyscrapers (seen from street level) all look like this. This view is so commonplace that your brain has become accustomed to transforming such converging lines into parallels. If you turn the figure upside down, that illusion disappears, because in reality, you almost never see lines that converge toward one another at the bottom and certainly not parallel lines that recede into the distance.”

“In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization. New insights come from new people and new environments–any circumstance in which the brain has a hard time predicting what will come next.”

We just moved into a new building we share with other design professionals, specifically landscape architects on the floor above us and architectural planners below. We have clients who are architects and engineers, who by definition are also designers. Of course we’re graphic designers. Then there’s fashion, product and interior designers. In addition, those who create structured services and activities and the integrated systems of computers and other forms of technology, also call themselves designers. With the vast array of products and services in the contemporary world, one might wonder if there really is a discipline of design shared by all who conceive and plan such things. As Richard Buchanan, a design theorist said, “The scope of design appears to be so great, and the range of styles and other qualities of individual products within even one category so diverse, that the prospect for identifying a common discipline seem dim.”

There is a wide range of beliefs about what design is, how it should be practiced, for what purpose, and what we accomplish through it. Every year for the past 20, I have taught the history of graphic design at the University of Utah. The subject matter of the class is essentially a history of graphic design objects, the careers of the important designers and the development of the technologies used. We don’t really discuss what design is. It’s similar for all design histories.

Unlike other scientific pursuits, designers don’t discover things like natural laws or a natural process (excepting occasional unintentional discoveries). Generally a designer invents something: an object, a new use, a possible application. Discovery and invention are essentially different. As Richard Buchanan says, “Designers deal with matters of choice, with things that may be different than they are… Any authority for the designer comes from recognized experience and practical wisdom in dealing with such matters, but the designer’s judgment and the results of his or her decisions are open to questioning by the general public, as are all matters of public policy and personal action, where things may be other than they are.”

The use of techniques and processes that systematize the discipline of design help to explain and understand how designers achieve their results. Such thinking is the basis behind the modern8 Perception Branding 5d process.We use it to explain and systemize how our design solutions come to be, in a discipline that isn’t easily defined.

When we make decisions we think we’re in control, making rational choices, using our logical, analytical left brain, but actually that’s not so. According to a new book, Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, we are anything but rational beings. Most decisions are based on highly irrational influences, which are all relative. We estimate the value of things according to how they compare with other things.

Most of what we consume from the world around us comes through our sight. We visually compare one option against another. In the diagram above, the green circle on the right is the same size as the one on the left, but the context is different and influences our perception.

Brands that have a real dedication to the value of visual aesthetics, like Target, Apple and Starbucks, dramatically influence how their brand is perceived. Brand guru, Marty Neumeir says that aesthetics is “the language of feeling, and in a society that’s information-rich and time-poor, people value feeling more than information.”

Aesthetics is so powerful it can turn a commodity into a premium product. How did Starbucks differentiate itself from Dunkin’ Donuts ten years ago? How was it able to change the accepted price of a cup of coffee? Dan Ariely, tells us that a decade later, Starbucks has actually changed our very understanding of coffee and its value, whether you get it from Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s or the grocery store.

The irrational nature of the human psyche may be the best reason yet to influence your brand perception by managing the aesthetics.

We have been engaged by a local architectural firm for brand strategy and identity development. While we were strategizing with the marketing director on factors that drive business development for architects, he explained to us the importance of experience and relationships. We asked which was more important in the minds of their clients. Is the accumulated experience of the firm, or are personal relationships more important?

The marketing director answered by diagramming the classic four squares with experience along one axis and relationships on the other. The best option is when you have project experience in addition to a client relationship. But lacking one or the other, relationships trump experience.

We like the diagrammatic approach, because it lets you visualize what you already know. You can literally map out perceptions. Whether it be the relative value of relationships vs. experience, or Stephen Covey’s Urgency vs. Importance matrix, you can take a great deal of information and look at it all at once. It lets you position brands and brand attributes relative to others with the dimensions that customers use to distinguish them.

Take simple attributes like innovative vs. traditional, and younger vs. older. Treat each of these as an endpoint of an axis on a map. Now consider well-known brand categories, like automobiles or soft drinks, for example. Position the relative importance of each attribute for different brands. Where would Coke be positioned vs. Red Bull? What about Volvo vs. Honda?

Choose the axes and quadrants appropriate for insights in your own industry and map your own brand against your competitors. Are there ways to position your company differently from others? Consider mapping different attributes, benefits and values that can be compared and contrasted. Small/large, local/national, expensive/inexpensive and many other attributes can be used to distinguish one brand against another.