Harley Davidson is also a client. The extraordinary thing about the Harley is that you hear it before you see it. I live near the Hell’s Angels HQ in Shoreditch, and come the AGM or clan funerals, the air runs rich with the throaty off-centered drumming that makes the Harley so distinctive. Urbain explains how the Harley sound is engineered into the machine: damping out whines, whirs, ticks, knocks, and other unwanted mechanical noises, then sculpting the noise to produce the right balance of sound from the intake, exhaust, engine and drivetrain. “The sound of the Harley Davidson is patented and engineered using our products. The original sound of the bike was horrible because the engineering was so poor, but it became part of the cult. Now very sophisticated things are done to preserve it. First you make the bike quiet. Then you open up the inlet and the outlet. Then the sound is replayed with different frequency spectrums to get feedback from target audiences. We quantify the subjective experience of what feels appropriate and this sets the engineering targets.”

We reflect on the irrational behaviors that go into making big decisions. We’ve all done it – bought a highly complex piece of kit because of the shape of the knobs or the colour of the casing. I bought my flat for the view. We can fall for the love of our life across a crowded room. Urbain talks about the magical touch-points that encapsulate a brand. “When people are buying a car in a showroom, they look at the design and smell the seats. They lift the bonnet, glance at the engine and listen to the sound of the closing door. We work on the sound of the door. It has nothing to do with the stiffness or structural integrity but the tiny connectors in the locking mechanism. If you buy a Mercedes you expect a different sound to any other car.”

In an increasingly interfaced and vicarious world, technology enables everything about us. We communicate with people we never meet. We eat food without any idea of the origin. We put our trust in modes of transport we have no control over. Choosing a flight or mobile phone involves a cocktail of allegiances. Our favourite airline might be BA but do we care if the plane is a Boeing or an Airbus? Are you in the iPhone or BlackBerry tribe? And which carrier do you choose – Motorola, or O2 or 3? Then Orange and T Mobile start sharing signals, which blurs the brand landscape even more. Urbain says that whatever we select, LMS is managing our feelings for us. “When you fly on a plane, the three things you want are safety, comfort and minimum engine noise. Every two seconds around the world an airplane touches down safely because we have engineered the landing gear. The most important thing a human being does is to talk, and your mobile phone only works thanks to telecommunications satellites. We have tested 80% of all the satellites in orbit.”

We decide that LMS is actually engineering emotions. Brands belong to customers. They hold them in their heads, and the brand entices people to express themselves through the brand. Branding is about fragments of memory and micro-judgments. Michael says that we interpret experiences, and compare them with the expectation and reputation of other brands. “It’s not only about the rational message, it’s the emotional message. Brands make it easier for people to choose things. There is no mass-market. It’s a dance with one person at a time, and there are millions of individuals. The brand is more valuable than the business. Businesses are engines that create brands.”

Most of the fundraising projects I work on are with destitute human rights foundations struggling for survival. Exterior events always seem to take place in the doldrums of winter on the streets of London, New York, Paris, Madrid or Den Haag which may sound glamorous but involves dripping tents, mobile blind spots, failing generators, obstreperous hecklers, scalding coffee and buckets of damp banknotes. Slightly more civilised are charity auctions (the rubber chicken circuit) in the Worshipful Guild of Cordwainers, or the Athenaeum Club, or the House of Lords where rich people happily gobble all the bubbly and trifle but fail to bid for anything. A nice change of pace then to be elevated to the Premier League and work with the University of Oxford helping them to beg for £1 billion plus. The Oxford Thinking campaign has been running for several years and broadcasts its success stories (establishing research projects, new college buildings, guaranteeing fellowships, founding scholarships and so on) to attract new donors. What really impresses is the University’s strategy of challenging experts from different disciplines to find counterintuitive solutions to intractable problems. Colliding different points of view interrupts habitual trains of thought and produces genuinely original solutions. I interviewed an amazing diversity of wizards in many Harry Potterish colleges (geologists, physicists, musicologists, sociologists, behaviourists, archivists and even performance artists), but the common objective to all is to develop practical applications that will make life a better place to live.

One of the most impressive projects is based in the Warneford Hospital, Headington where the Craniofacial Team of clinicians, scientists and psychologists is researching how parents relate to children born with cleft lips and palates. The condition varies in severity but causes difficulties with feeding, speaking, hearing and socialisation. Part of the process at Warneford is to show parents images of children with disfigurements and using sophisticated real-time digital imaging figure out how the neural patterns correlate with emotional reactions. Face to face contact and particularly the smile is the baby’s biggest communication with the parent, but many mums and dads can’t see past the problem. If you can break through the disappointment of giving birth to a baby with a cleft, parents can come to terms with it intellectually. Counsellors at the centre help parents understand what their baby is trying to communicate by guiding them – almost communicating on behalf of their baby – so the parent moves away from the internal preoccupation and looks for clues. Early and intensive intervention is absolutely essential. It can make an enormous difference, not just in the first few years but long into later life. Dr Tim Goodacre is the craniofacial surgeon on the team. “Understanding the neural side relieves the pressure to operate. The surgery isn’t the thing. It’s about what’s going on in the parent / child interaction, and how can we change that. What do we see when we look at a child with a facial abnormality? Our innate response is to stare. Our learned response is to turn away. We are interested in how these responses interfere with the baby’s development and how families deal with them. These early experiences exert a huge influence over the bond between parent and child. We work closely with families on many levels, but ultimately it’s about helping the children to help themselves.”