The Unoptimised Human — The Construction Is the Product
Your monthly behavioural science briefing from David Chadderton
Your monthly behavioural science briefing from David Chadderton
There is a Belgian sommelier called Ilja Gort who, a few years ago, proved something that the marketing industry has spent decades trying not to articulate clearly. He took a €2.50 supermarket wine, gave it a fictitious label, a fabricated backstory, and a gold medal from a competition that did not exist. He entered it into a blind tasting judged by experts. It won.
The wine did not change. The reality surrounding the wine changed. And the reality was enough.
That experiment has been living in my head this month as I watched the same principle play out across wildly different domains, from the FIFA World Cup to the European car market to the quiet replacement of 130 bank employees with an algorithm. The pattern is consistent and, once you see it, impossible to unsee: the product is not the point. The construction surrounding the product is the point. And the people who understand how that construction works, at the psychological level, are the ones who win.
This month on The Unoptimised Human, I have been pulling at that thread from multiple angles. Here is what emerged.
The Confirmation Economy: How Modern Branding Manufactures Reality
The piece that set the frame for everything else this month. A €2.50 wine walks into a room full of experts and walks out with a gold medal, and the only thing that changed was the reality surrounding it. This is not a story about gullible sommeliers. It is a story about how every human quality judgement is contextual, and how the most effective brands do not sell products, they construct realities so convincing that the people living inside them cannot see the walls.
The Confirmation Economy is not a conspiracy. It is a description of how humans actually make decisions: not by evaluating the thing, but by evaluating the reality in which the thing exists.
“Competent Beige”: When AI Optimises the Soul Out of Your Brand
If the Confirmation Economy describes how reality is constructed, this piece describes what happens when you hand the construction to a machine. AI produces content that is polished, grammatically correct, strategically structured, and indistinguishable from every other brand using the same tools. I called it “Competent Beige”, and 54% of Americans are already reporting AI fatigue.
The irony is sharp: the same technology that promises personalisation at scale is producing the most homogeneous brand landscape in living memory. When everyone optimises for the same signals, everyone sounds the same. The brands that will survive the AI content flood are not the ones that produce more. They are the ones that remain recognisably, defiantly human.
The Psychology of the Final Four: Why the World Cup’s Last Week Is a Behavioural Experiment
Twelve million people watched the World Cup’s final week. Most previews treated the remaining matches as tactical problems. They were not. They were behavioural experiments.
This piece used the tournament’s closing stages as a lens for understanding how tribal identity, Social Identity Theory, and the fundamental human need for belonging explain why sport generates emotional intensity that no other product category can match. The fans in those stadiums were not buying football. They were purchasing a cure for the isolating fragmentation of the modern world. They were buying a ticket to belong.
The insight for marketers is not complicated: when you understand which psychological need your audience is trying to satisfy, you stop selling products and start building bridges.
Join The DOTS: Communication That Lands, Every Time
I published the DOTS framework this month, a practical communication model built on the STAR typology. The premise is simple but the application is not: the same four elements (Data, Opportunity, Togetherness, Stabilise) produce completely different outcomes depending on the order in which you deploy them, because different psychological types prioritise different needs.
Thinkers need the data first. Adventurers need the opportunity. Socialisers need to feel the togetherness. Realists need the stabilisation. Get the sequence right and your message lands. Get it wrong and you are talking to yourself.
This is the practical end of everything I have been writing about this month: if reality is constructed, and if different people inhabit different psychological realities, then communication is not about what you say. It is about the order in which you say it.
What I’m Watching: The EU AI Act Deadline
On 2nd August, Article 50 of the EU AI Act takes effect. This is the provision that specifically targets AI systems used for consumer-facing interactions, including chatbots, recommendation engines, and automated decision-making tools. For brands using AI in their marketing stack, and that is most brands at this point, the compliance question is no longer theoretical.
I wrote about what Article 50 actually means and why the brands that treat this as a box-ticking exercise will miss the real opportunity: the ones that embrace transparency about their AI use will build more trust than the ones that hide it. The regulation is coming whether you are ready or not. The question is whether you treat it as a constraint or as a competitive advantage.
The Question
Here is what I keep coming back to. If the construction is the product, and if AI is now capable of building the construction faster, cheaper, and at greater scale than any human team, then what happens to the brands that were only ever good at construction and never actually good at the thing they were constructing?
The €2.50 wine won the medal because the construction was brilliant. But the wine was still €2.50. At some point, someone drinks it. And the gap between the reality you constructed and the experience you deliver is where brands either survive or die.
So here is the provocation: How much of what your brand calls “value” is actually product quality, and how much is manufactured reality? Be honest. The answer might be uncomfortable. But in an age where AI can construct reality at scale, the brands that survive will be the ones where the product actually justifies the story.
David Chadderton spent his twenties and thirties teaching people how to make life-or-death decisions at forty thousand feet. He now applies the same principles to consumer psychology, which, depending on the brief, can feel equally high-stakes. He’s the creator of the STAR Framework and the author of The STAR Framework: Rewriting the Rules of Consumer Engagement (NYC Big Book Award 2025), The STAR Operating System: Decode Mindset, Understand Motivation, Transform Human Behaviour, and Dear Algorithm, It’s Not Me, It’s You. By day, a Chief Marketing Officer. By night, a behavioural science obsessive who writes The Unoptimised Human because he can’t stop thinking about why people do what they do.
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The STAR Framework
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