Diamond Shreddies, the frame is the value
This is documented history rather than a laboratory result. The events are well recorded. What they teach is an argument, and the entry makes it openly.
Shreddies is a breakfast cereal, small woven squares, sold in Canada for decades with the flat sales of a product everyone already knows. In 2008, a young advertising strategist proposed something that sounds like a joke. Take the exact same square cereal, put it in the box rotated forty five degrees, call it Diamond Shreddies, and market it as an exciting new shape. A square turned on its corner is a diamond only if you decide to call it one. The campaign leaned into the absurdity, even running mock taste tests where people claimed the diamonds tasted better than the squares, and everyone was partly in on the joke. And it worked anyway. Sales rose. A combo box offering both Squares and Diamonds outsold the plain original. The cereal was molecularly identical. Only the frame around it had changed, and the frame moved real money.
The identical thing can feel more valuable depending purely on how it is presented, named, and framed, and that is a fact about how people actually experience worth rather than a trick to dismiss. It cuts both ways, which is why it matters. A genuinely good thing you offer can lose to a worse thing that is framed better, so quality alone does not win. And the way you present your own work is part of the value people actually experience rather than decoration sitting on top of it. The same substance, framed carelessly or framed well, is not the same to the person receiving it, even when it is chemically identical cereal.
Source: The Diamond Shreddies campaign, Ogilvy, 2008. Documented marketing history.
Rory Sutherland, 2019
On why framing and presentation change the value people actually experience, cereal included.
Draw your own card. It does not take long, and it rewards taking your time.