The behavioural science of persuasion, positioning, and why some brands win while others disappear.
Every goalkeeper dives. Every marketing team rushes to "do something." But the communication that actually lands begins one step earlier — with understanding...
A STAR Framework analysis of why the technology built to simplify choice is quietly dismantling it.
Every few years, marketing undergoes a ritual purge of its favourite buzzwords. Right now, the bell tolls for psychographic segmentation.
You do not need a psychology degree to understand how people are motivated. You just need to watch a family sit down with a box of Lego.
Everyone in marketing is talking about trust right now. The Edelman Trust Barometer says it. PwC says it. Every LinkedIn thought leader with a Canva template...
There is a paradox at the centre of modern marketing, and it has been bothering me all month.
Google's Demand Gen, Display, Paid Social and programmatic advertising are sold to universities and PBSA operators as essential upper and mid-funnel tools. T...
There's a moment, and you've probably had it, where an algorithm serves you something so precisely targeted that it feels less like a recommendation and more...
July was a strange month to be in marketing.
David Chadderton Creator of the STAR Framework | Chief Marketing Officer | Author
Your monthly behavioural science briefing from David Chadderton
There's a difference between a landing that was always going to work and one that could have gone either way.
The monthly roundup from The Unoptimised Human. What I wrote, what I noticed, and what it all means.
A monthly roundup from David Chadderton
The vibe coding conversation has been one of the more interesting cultural moments in tech this year. Someone with no engineering background prompts an AI to...
Why the most dangerous phrase in marketing is "we need to do something," and what penalty shootouts teach us about the courage of inaction.
The penalty kick study explains everything wrong with how PBSA brands react to slow sales.
BYD and peers just outsold Japanese automakers in Europe for the first time. What does brand loyalty actually rest on?
Author: David Chadderton, CMO, Homes for Students Version: 1.0 — June 2026 Status: Draft for Implementation
Why the most powerful motivational framework in psychology explains everything from Patagonia's cult following to why you keep buying things you don't need —...
24 notes for posting over 3 days. Max 120 words each.
Gen Z isn't hiding from brands. They're building something more sophisticated than anything your segmentation model can see.
A practical guide for marketing teams and businesses navigating AI regulation in Europe
Discipline: Behavioural Psychology / Health Psychology / Consumer Psychology Proposed Methodology: Mixed methods (quantitative survey with qualitative follow...
Safety first. That's how students choose accommodation. 34.6% of them pick Safety and Security as their number one priority when selecting where to live. Mor...
Three psychological needs drive everything you do. Two of them get all the attention. The third one is the one that breaks you.
How three psychological segments turn a niche product into a normal choice, and why the tipping point is a social identity flip, not a sales milestone.
The monthly newsletter from David Chadderton
Your monthly round-up from The Unoptimised Human on Substack
If there is one thread that runs through everything I wrote this month, it is this: the organisations that will survive the next five years are the ones that...
Most student accommodation marketing stops at the booking. The data says that is exactly where the story begins.
The data behind a year of student voices, and what it reveals about the psychology of home.
What drives a business?
You can build anything now. That was never the hard part.
A Belgian sommelier took a €2.50 supermarket wine, gave it a label, a backstory, and a gold medal, and proved that the product was never the point. What he a...
The consideration set is being formed before the customer knows they have one. The brands that understand this are already winning. The ones that don't are a...
The first decision about where they live is being made by a system that doesn't know you. And most operators have no idea it's happening.
Havas just published the largest study on brand desire in history. They found that desire, not visibility, predicts sustained growth. But desire is not one t...
There are four people in the M&S food hall on a Saturday afternoon. A twenty-three-year-old in a North Face jacket is photographing the meal deal options, no...
Italy is celebrating. Seventy-nine years after Corradino d'Ascanio sketched the first prototype for an aircraft manufacturer that had just lost a war, the Ve...
My mate Steve has been banking with the same high street bank for twenty-three years. He hates them. Genuinely hates them. The app is clunky, the overdraft f...
75% of UK consumers find AI-driven personalisation intrusive. That's not a technology problem. That's a psychological boundary being crossed.
If Gen Z conditionally aligns around values-in-context, demographic segmentation is dead. Here's what to replace it with.
How a crocodile attack email became a case study in brand self-sabotage, and why AI is making these disasters more likely, not less.
A response to the data. And the wrong conclusions drawn from it.
Gen Z brand loyalty is conditional tribalism. They want community but resist fixed identity. And that contradiction is breaking every segmentation model you'...
Trust isn't collapsing. It's retreating. And the brands that understand the difference will own the next decade.
Capgemini published a report this month that should make every marketer uncomfortable. Not because the numbers are surprising, but because they reveal a tens...
Why some customers don't just buy your brand. They become it.
David Chadderton Chief Marketing Officer, Homes for Students | VervLife | Orla
Title: Exhaustion Format: Historical feature film Tagline: Three armies. Two invasions. One battle that defined a millennium.
The UK is banning social media for under-16s. The ban's own evidence suggests it won't work. So why does it feel like progress?
On 2 August 2026, the EU AI Act's transparency obligations become enforceable. Most marketers have no idea.
June 2026 · Practical compliance guidance for marketers, agencies, and brand teams
The ASA's new guidance on AI-generated advertising reveals a deeper crisis of authenticity.
📌 AI AND AI INTEGRATION
The personalisation industry has spent a decade perfecting the art of the nudge. Here's why it's time to build something better, and what a 40-year-old psych...
The most expensive assumption in marketing is that past behaviour predicts future behaviour. Here's what to replace it with.
A recent Gartner survey found that consumers want AI to help them shop, but not to make purchase decisions for them. The STAR Framework explains exactly why,...
When a brand outsources cultural intelligence to a language model, it doesn't get efficiency. It gets a blind spot the size of a democracy movement.
The most powerful algorithm on earth isn't running on a server. It's running inside your head.
Why dentsu's own research proves that "Gen Z consumer behaviour" is a contradiction in terms
Marketing / Consumer Psychology
OpenAI launched a self-serve advertising platform inside ChatGPT last week. Google is automatically migrating every advertiser onto AI Max. The CMO role, alr...
Eli Lilly has launched a website in the UK with a URL that is also its entire argument: uk.lilly.com/obesityisadisease. The site is part of a broader campaig...
When the leading evangelist of behavioural economics joins an influence analytics platform, it looks like a validation of behaviour tracking. In reality, it...
Someone listed 10 Downing Street on Booking.com. Not the real one, obviously. A spoof listing for the most famous address in the United Kingdom, complete wit...
There's a pattern emerging across everything I've written this month, and I didn't see it until I sat down to pull this together. It started with a LinkedIn...
This month, every piece I wrote kept returning to the same collision point: the moment an optimised system encounters an unoptimised human, and the interesti...
Demographics are dead. Needs-based segmentation is the replacement. Neither one can explain why two people who want the same thing make opposite decisions.