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Applied Phenomenology: Marketing, Investing, AI
Phenomenology, for me, is not some theory, but something that permanently changed how I perceive, think, and work.
What Is Phenomenology?
Phenomenology is a method of inquiry concerned above all with how things appear and show themselves to us. It studies experience itself, how we perceive and understand the world before we begin to form theories about it.
The tradition was founded by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. It examines the structures of experience: how we perceive, how we understand, and how meaning forms before any analysis or assumption enters the picture.
That sounds abstract.
In practice, it means examining what most people take for granted: perception, understanding, language, emotion, meaning. But not as psychological categories, and that is important.
The key figures, Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, each explored different angles. Heidegger examined human existence itself. Gadamer studied how interpretation works. Merleau-Ponty focused on the body and perception.
What connects them is one conviction: the way things appear to us is not obvious. It is worth examining seriously.
Why Most People Give Up
Phenomenology does not reward impatience. The first thing it does is lower your confidence in how quickly you can understand it. It tests your curiosity and your intellectual honesty in ways most disciplines do not.
The texts are hard. Understanding a single passage from Heidegger can take weeks. Many students encounter phenomenology once and move on. The ones who stay are the ones who find the difficulty itself interesting, not frustrating.
I was drawn to it precisely because it was the hardest thing I encountered at university.
Phenomenology in Everyday Life
My work involves applying phenomenology in marketing, managerial decision-making, and investing. I do qualitative analysis focused on how we perceive and understand the world around us, especially in areas where traditional analytical methods fall short.
In marketing, phenomenology does something data alone cannot. Not whether a campaign converted, but whether it made sense at all to someone encountering it for the first time.
In investing, it helps me observe mood and narrative, not whether sentiment is positive or negative, but how the market is understanding the current situation.
And in the age of artificial intelligence, phenomenology perhaps holds the greatest potential. It has produced serious research on perception, understanding, language, and meaning, topics foundational to developing genuinely good language models.
University and the Path to Phenomenology
What phenomenology did almost immediately was turn my attention to things I had never examined before: perception, understanding, language, anxiety. I may have sensed these things before, the way anyone does. But I had never named them, never looked at them closely, and could not have used them as a basis for anything I was doing.
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Common questions on this article's topic
What is phenomenology?
What does phenomenology mean?
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If you have any thoughts, questions, or feedback, feel free to drop me a message at mail@richardgolian.com.
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