Return To The Macro

Some trends have outpaced and outlasted others - and PSFK's audience are exploring how to get more out of themes in food & beverage, luxury and retail.

This week, we dig into five themes the community has been researching using PSFK’s Fodda, with three new product promos blended in so naturally you’ll barely notice.

Listen To The Sound of Transmission

First, an experiment in brand utility. So, you remember the consumer champion service Service Buddy - right? Well I used an experimental Google audio model to build a new AI tool that can listen to your car engine for squeaky sounds and explain what’s wrong with it (probably).

The LinkedIn article walks through the approach and tech stack. The tool itself is here - point your phone at a rattling engine. And there’s a short explainer video featuring the cast from the original demo.

Synthetic Expert analysis of Real Expert insight

Another product that I’ve shipped this week was for PSFK’s Fodda: Synthetic Experts. You all know about using synthetic consumers for research, yeah? Well, think of these as AI experts that help you see the bigger picture within a single prompt.

The idea is straightforward. A Synthetic Expert is an AI analyst trained across multiple Fodda graphs and industry reports at once, so when you ask the Retail Strategy & Innovation Lead about store format shifts, it isn’t just running a search on the PSFK graph. It’s cross-referencing McKinsey, Deloitte, Capgemini, DHL and Mintel in the same query, surfacing patterns that no single source would catch on its own.

We’ve gone further with a few of them. We created a Digital Twin of Ben Dietz - built on a deep [SIC] newsletter archive, with trends and evidence items, plus a mapped expertise range, declared blind spots (he’ll tell you straight he doesn’t cover B2B or supply chain or Clinton Hill…), and a calibrated voice profile. The point of building it this way is uncertainty calibration. When the expert doesn’t know something it says so, and tells you which graph would.

We asked the synthetic experts their take on the big themes users of Fodda were asking questions about over the last week. It’s interesting - I think - that we’re still exploring themes that we’ve heard about for a while home drinking, quiet luxury, treat culture, and fandom - these are constant (yet evolving) themes in our shifting sea of change. Read on. (pls)

Home Sparkles

Imbibing at home no longer means a six-pack and a teen-diluted bottle of Titos tucked into the freezer behind the frozen waffles. Consumers are pulling the bar, the cocktail menu and the equipment into the kitchen, and spirits brands, RTD makers and retailers all need different answers. We asked our new Food & Beverage Innovation Lead synthetic analyst to give some insight. Learn More

Quiet Luxury Redux

Before you groan.., wait…. While the concept of quiet luxury first developed circa 2022 around products sold by Loro Piana and The Row, today we have a different version. Quiet Luxury in 2026 is one about access, ritual, and who gets through the door. We asked a digital twin of, erm, Piers Fawkes to raid the knowledge and provide a premium update. Learn More

Treat Culture

Meaningful treat experiences in 2026 transcend mere enjoyment. They act as deliberate counter-programming to the prevailing "snackification" of culture - offering curated access, authentic connection, and a signal of discerning taste. To understand this better we asked Ben Dietz’s digital twin, built on his SIC newsletter archive, to weigh in. Learn More

Fandom

Fandom is reorganizing around authenticity, niche narratives, and fragmented attention. The athlete-as-brand in 2026 is a self-contained media entity, leveraging technology to bypass traditional gatekeepers. To understand this better we also asked Ben Dietz's digital twin, built on his SIC Weekly archive, to weigh in. Learn More

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All four of those came from synthetic experts running across our standard graph setup. But we shipped one more thing this week that changes what those same experts can do.

Skills & Personalization

We also shipped Skills this week. Think of a Skill as a lens your synthetic expert looks through after it's gathered the evidence. It doesn't change the data. It changes how the data gets read before it reaches you. Paralogy is the first Skill live on Fodda. Built by David Carson (who also writes the Dumbify newsletter), it applies structured creative friction to every answer - blind-spot scans, counter-narratives, deliberately wrong reframings.

David’s the sharpest person I’ve spoken to on why LLMs collapse to the average answer. The short video linked below where he explains why he built Paralogy.

The easiest way to see what that means is to run the same question twice. Here's our synthetic retail expert on personalization, with Paralogy off:

"Personalization in mass and mid-market retail is evolving beyond basic recommendations to encompass proactive AI-driven discovery, service-led physical experiences, and contextually curated offerings across diverse sectors." Read This Version

Now here’s the same expert with Paralogy’s ‘Wrong Answer’ skill toggled on:

”Stop personalizing. The entire premise of mass-market personalization is broken at the consumer level - not because the technology fails, but because the consumer has stopped believing the deal is fair.” Read This Version

Same expert. Same question. Same underlying graph. Two strategists running this no longer come back with the same deck - which is sort of the point.

If you’ve got this far and haven’t trialled Fodda in Claude or Perplexity for free yet, reply to this or DM me and I’ll set you up.

Piers

Founder, PSFK & Fodda