In the race to make retail media more precise, marketers have long relied on purchase history, loyalty data and real-time browsing signals. But new insights from Manhattan Mental Health Counseling (MMHC) suggest the next major targeting advantage may come from something less visible and far more human: a shopper’s cognitive and emotional state.
What appears to be routine grocery shopping, mental health experts say, is actually one of the most cognitively demanding tasks in everyday life. Consumers are not just selecting products; they are planning meals, recalling needs, managing budgets and navigating tens of thousands of options, often while under time pressure. The result is a compressed decision-making environment where stress, fatigue and cognitive overload directly shape behaviour.
Retail media reframed
For retail media networks, that reframes how shopper signals should be interpreted.
“What makes grocery shopping such a revealing experience is that it compresses a wide range of cognitive and emotional processes into a short period of time,” says mental health expert Steven Buchwald of MMHC. “People are planning, remembering, comparing, budgeting and regulating their emotions all at once.”
That compression has measurable consequences. As cognitive load builds, decision quality declines, impulse control weakens and avoidance behaviours increase. In practical terms, this is what marketers see as abandoned carts, prolonged browsing, or last-minute impulse purchases. But rather than isolated actions, these behaviours may reflect shifts in mental capacity during the shopping journey.
Retail media platforms, which sit closest to the point of purchase, are uniquely positioned to detect and respond to these shifts in real time.
A shopper who enters without a plan and lingers across categories may not be casually browsing, but struggling with executive function overload. One who repeatedly compares similar products could be experiencing decision paralysis. Meanwhile, the familiar spike in basket additions at checkout may be less about promotion effectiveness and more about decision fatigue, as depleted mental resources reduce self-control.
These nuances are increasingly relevant as retailers invest in more sophisticated on-site advertising and personalisation. The challenge – and opportunity – is to move beyond static audience segmentation toward dynamic interpretation of in-session behaviour.
Instead of asking only what a shopper is likely to buy, marketers can begin to ask how capable they are of making decisions at that moment.
Change the message
This shift has implications for both targeting and creative execution. Messaging that simplifies choices or reduces friction may resonate more strongly with cognitively overloaded shoppers, while reassurance and social proof could help those stuck in comparison loops. Conversely, emotionally driven messaging may perform best when shoppers are mentally fatigued and more susceptible to impulse.
The timing of these interventions is equally critical. A single shopping session may contain multiple psychological states, from focused planning at the start to fatigue-driven decision-making at the end. Retail media, with its ability to respond in-session, offers a rare opportunity to align messaging with those transitions.
Buchwald notes that these behaviours often reflect broader mental strain, rather than the task itself. “When someone feels overwhelmed, indecisive, or mentally drained in that setting, it is often not about the task itself, but about the cumulative load their brain is already carrying,” he says.
For marketers, that insight underscores a broader shift taking place across retail media: the move from intent-based targeting to context-aware engagement. Behavioural signals are no longer just indicators of interest, they are proxies for mental state.
As competition intensifies and retailers look to differentiate their media offerings, understanding the psychology behind shopper behaviour could become a critical advantage. In an environment defined by choice overload, the brands that succeed may not be those that shout the loudest, but those that make decisions easier.
In that sense, the future of retail media may lie not just in better data, but also in better interpretation – recognising that behind every click, hesitation, or impulse buy is a shopper navigating the limits of their attention.
And increasingly, those limits are what shape the sale.
