NOT A
CAREER.
A CALLING.
Most people who end up in marketing started there. I didn't. I came through engineering, through agencies, through the kind of fieldwork that puts you inside real brand problems — not case studies. And through a years-long obsession with a question nobody around me was asking: why do people actually buy?
Not the marketing answer. The human answer. The one that lives underneath the funnel, underneath the creative brief, underneath everything that can be measured. I went looking for it in political psychology research — and found something that permanently changed how I see every purchase decision ever made.
What follows is how that happened.
I started where most people do — following a conventional path. Engineering. Then freelancing. Then an agency. I was good at each. But I kept finding myself more interested in the person reading the ad than in the ad itself. Why did this message land? Why did that one not? What was actually happening inside the decision? Those questions wouldn't leave me alone.
I went deep into political psychology research — 100+ PhD-level papers on persuasion, cognitive bias, identity, loss aversion, social proof, and the architecture of human decisions. I was studying how people choose political candidates. And somewhere in that research, something cracked open. The same invisible mechanisms driving voter behavior were driving every purchase decision ever made. Identity. Fear. Belonging. The subconscious safety scan before any commitment. Marketing had been optimising the surface for decades. Nobody was working here — underneath it. I couldn't unsee it.
I took every framework out of the research and put it in front of real brand problems. D2C. E-commerce. Consumer goods. Brand after brand, I started applying the psychological principles where agencies were applying tactics — and the gap in results was immediate. When you understand what the buyer's brain is actually responding to, you stop guessing and start engineering. The work was different in kind. Not incremental improvement — a completely different category of outcome. Every brand problem was now a psychology problem first.
Published my first book. Keynoted the Vietnam Digital Summit — 3,000 people. Recognised as a Top 10 digital marketer. But more significant than any of that was what the stage confirmed: the room didn't have a name for what I was doing. They called it digital marketing. They called it growth. I knew it was something more specific — a discipline that sat underneath all of those labels. I just hadn't written it yet.
The second book was the one that mattered. Psycho Marketing — 50,000+ copies globally. It didn't just describe what I'd been doing. It gave the discipline its name and its structure. For the first time, marketing practitioners had a rigorous framework built on actual human psychology — not best practices, not platform hacks, not another funnel model. The response confirmed what I'd believed since 2012: there was a massive gap between how buyers actually work and how marketers were treating them. This book was the first serious attempt to close it.
Founded Huumons. Re-entered brand consulting with a clearer thesis and a more refined set of tools. The frameworks that had taken years to build were now battle-tested across enough real problems to be genuinely reliable. Every brand I worked with showed results that their previous agencies couldn't explain — because their agencies were looking at the ads. I was looking at the person reading them. What they felt. What they feared. What would make them feel safe enough to buy.
Took on a CMO role inside a D2C brand that had plateaued. The brief was growth. The real problem, as always, was psychology — how the brand was sitting inside the buyer's mind versus how it needed to. Six months later, monthly revenue had grown 12x. Repeat purchase rate more than doubled. Not through better ads. Through a rebuilt understanding of what the buyer needed to feel before they would come back. The frameworks weren't theory anymore. They were a proven system.
A marketing psychology intelligence firm. A third book in progress. A platform built around one conviction that has been true since 2012: every gap between a great product and its full potential is psychological. The research that started as an obsession is now a body of work. The frameworks that started in academic papers are now inside 50+ brands. And the discipline that had no name when I found it is now the most important thing most marketers have never seriously studied.