A Belgian television program called "On n'est pas des pigeons" ran an experiment that is a clean proof of the meaning-experience relationship. They bought a bottle of supermarket wine; a cheap, unremarkable Belgian table wine; and entered it into an international wine competition. Before entering, they gave it a new label and a fabricated analysis report; an entirely fictional backstory of origin, complexity, and production process. The wine was described by the international jury as "smooth and rich" and awarded the highest marks in its category. The wine did not change. The grapes did not change. The fermentation, the aging, the alcohol content; nothing changed. What changed was the pre-product: the label, the story, the context in which the wine arrived to the judges. And the judges; professionals, people trained specifically to evaluate wine on its intrinsic merits; gave it the highest marks available. This is not a story about foolish judges or a flawed competition. It's a demonstration that experienced value is not separable from the context of experience; that meaning is not a layer on top of perception but a constituent of it. The judges experienced a smooth, rich wine because the signals they received before tasting told them to expect one. For any product: the question is not whether meaning is affecting the user's experience. It is. The question is whether you are managing that meaning deliberately or leaving it to accumulate at random.