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Applied Phenomenology: Marketing, Investing, AI
Phenomenology, for me, is not a theory, it is primarily a method, and something that permanently changed how I perceive the world and myself, how I think and how I work.
What Is Phenomenology?
Phenomenology is a method of inquiry concerned above all with how things show themselves to us. It studies experience itself, how we perceive and understand the world before we begin to form theories about it.
It is also described as one of the philosophical traditions. Most philosophical traditions, however, start with a theory and we then look at the world through it. Phenomenology does the opposite. It starts with how things actually appear to us, and asks what that tells us about the world and about ourselves.
The tradition was founded by Edmund Husserl in the early 20th century. He examined how we perceive, how we understand, and how meaning forms before any theory or assumption enters the picture.
That sounds abstract.
In practice, it means examining what most people take for granted: perception, understanding, language, emotion, meaning. Not as psychological categories, but as structures that shape how any situation appears to someone before they even begin to analyse it.
The key figures in phenomenology are Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger examined human existence itself. Merleau-Ponty focused on the body and perception.
What connects them is one belief: the way things appear to us is not obvious. It needs to be examined.
Phenomenology Is Not an Easy Discipline to Understand
Phenomenology demands patience, determination and a great deal of curiosity. The texts are difficult. Understanding a single passage from Heidegger can take weeks. Many philosophy students encounter phenomenology once and find it so hard that they would rather devote themselves to another discipline. The ones who stay are often the ones who find the difficulty itself interesting, not frustrating.
I was drawn to it precisely because it was the hardest thing I had encountered at university.
Phenomenology in Everyday Life
Today I do not work in academia. I work in the commercial sphere, but I still draw heavily on what I gained from studying phenomenology. Above all in the way I described above, that I treat phenomenology as a method. When I say that I do applied phenomenology, it means that I apply phenomenology as a method.
My work involves applying phenomenology in marketing, managerial decision-making, and investing. I do it in those situations where traditional analytical methods fall short.
In marketing, phenomenology does something data alone cannot. It lets you see how understandable a campaign is from so many angles that no quantitative research will show you.
In investing, it helps me observe mood and narrative, not whether there is optimism or pessimism in the market, but again, it shows the context in which that optimism and that pessimism are born, through a completely new lens.
And in the age of artificial intelligence, phenomenology is perhaps most underappreciated. It has produced research on perception, understanding, language and meaning, topics foundational to what language models generate.
University and the Path to Phenomenology
What phenomenology did almost immediately was turn my attention to things I had never examined seriously before: perception, understanding, language, anxiety. Until then I had seen no need to understand them more deeply. Today I see that understanding as the basis for understanding everything else.
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What is phenomenology?
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