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Retailers have long drawn on behavioural techniques, nudges, to persuade consumers to purchase. Some have given rise to eponymous concepts like the ‘IKEA effect’ where consumers attribute higher value to products assembled themselves, fostering brand resonance. In digital advertising, nudges include complete-the-look carousels, star ratings, and one-click shoppable ads on social media. However, the implicit assumption is that consumers pay attention to these. But does this remain true in 2026?

Economists now treat human attention as a scarce resource comparable to land, labour, and capital reflecting that attention is finite, rivalrous, and exhaustible. Social media platforms have industrialised the harvesting and monetisation of attention, creating a paradox: the more content floods the environment, the less effective each individual message becomes. In this context of structural overstimulation, brands including Gentle Monster and New Balance are moving from persuading through exposure to cultivating cultural belonging, offering a new angle to a job department store historically used to excel at: shaping their communities’ culture.

The commodification of attention

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon theorised the “attention economy” in 1971, stating that ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’ He identified attention as the finite resource that limits action in information-saturated environments. Attention has emerged as the currency of the digital era where platforms compete for user engagement by deploying algorithms designed to retain monetisable eyeballs. An unending stream of short-form videos ensures that stimulating material keeps individuals scrolling, transforming focus into a coveted commodity. On average, TikTok users spend 58 minutes daily on the platform, but only 1.7 seconds viewing each piece of content, with teenagers toggling between apps every 44 seconds.

Social media platforms have built trillion-dollar enterprises by monetising the extraction of human attention. Platforms offer free services while harvesting personal data (browsing patterns, micro-interactions, location, emotional states) to build behavioural profiles enabling micro-targeted advertising, sold in real-time programmatic auctions. These platforms use variable reinforcement schedules (the same mechanism that makes gambling addictive) through notifications, likes, and algorithmic content serving as unpredictable rewards triggering compulsive engagement

. Shoshana Zuboff’s framework of “surveillance capitalism” calls this converting raw behavioural data into ‘prediction products’ sold to advertisers seeking to influence future purchases. Social media ad revenue grew +36.7% in 2024, with Meta, Google, and Amazon together representing 62% of total worldwide digital ad spending in 2026. Deloitte found that social platforms capture over 50% of US ad spending, with 63% of Gen Z and 49% of Millennials saying that social media ads are most influential on purchasing decisions.

Retail media has emerged as a force in the advertising ecosystem by capitalising on first-party data but does not inherently address the broader issue of attention attrition. Retail media is becoming a priority for department stores, with David Jones investing $250 million in its Amplify retail media arm, Falabella hosting Fmedia Day for brands and sellers, and Breuninger strengthening its retail media infrastructure to address customers and brands. Despite using proprietary data such as purchase histories, search behaviour, and loyalty programme insights, to enable hyper personalised advertising, it is increasingly insufficient to engage already overwhelmed consumers.

AI is simultaneously accelerating attention extraction and disrupting the ecosystem through which it is monetised. Fitch Ratings estimated a 15% decline in global search traffic as of June 2025 due to AI-generated summaries. Bain & Company estimated 80% of internet users receiving answers on search pages without clicking external links, reducing traffic for advertisers by up to 25%. This contributes to the advertising saturation that overloads consumers.

The paradox of saturation is that the more advertising floods the environment, the less each individual advertisement works, desensitising consumers. 74% of users cite intrusive ads as their main reason for using ad blockers, costing the advertising industry $54 billion globally in 2024. Procter & Gamble's 2017 decision to cut $200 million from digital ad spending had no measurable impact on sales. The causes identified included significant spend reaching bots and hyper-targeting creating frequency waste. Algorithmic glut and the relentless extraction of attention, evidenced by the online shopping overwhelm of 78% of Gen Z, is forcing an analysis of the nature of advertising itself.

The post-broadcast era: rebuilding shared meaning

The transition from twentieth-century mass broadcasting to hyper-personalised targeting has fractured the cultural infrastructure that sustained a cohesive monoculture. Historically, universally experienced media and advertising served as shared touchstones that fostered collective discourse; for instance, IKEA's 2017 Game of Thrones mock assembly manual generated a unifying buzz experienced simultaneously by millions. Today, this connective tissue has been eroded by on-demand consumption, algorithmic precision, and platforms incentivised to cater to niche audiences. As traditional cultural gatekeepers have been ousted by engagement-driven algorithms, collective narratives have been replaced with individualised content, dismantling the mechanisms that enabled mass culture.

This dissolution of monoculture was stark by the summer of 2025, which lacked the overarching narratives of 2024’s Brat or 2023’s Barbie that saw retail activations surrounding these cultural moments. While disconnected trends like Pucci dresses and capri pants surfaced without mutual reinforcement in 2025, the era of algorithmic micro-trends like "cottagecore" and "mob wife" collapsed as consumers reject manufactured movements in favour of offline authenticity. As economic pressure and information overload dissolve shared context into individualised fragments, consumers and especially lonely younger generations, are turning to brands that offering the connection created by shared culture.

Culture is the pillar of economic infrastructure that generates trust and social cohesion required to legitimise institutions and ensure commercial transactions. In times of disruption, shared cultural foundation fosters the collective adaptability necessary for economic resilience. Like a power grid provides physical infrastructure, a cultural infrastructure provides the shared meaning for any overarching economic system to function.

Brands and retailers increasingly fill this vacuum as cultural gatekeepers with consumer purchasing decisions no longer driven solely by product features and price; rather, they are tethered to a brand’s cultural legitimacy. Failing to navigate this landscape can result in the social backlash and declining sales following Target's DEI rollback or the criticism surrounding American Eagle's culturally disconnected campaigns. As the metrics of short-term attention become less reliable, department stores must build long-term cultural capital, centring the social cohesion of their consumer base.

The business of belonging

The shift from broadcast persuasion to cultural belonging draws on theoretical frameworks, some that retailers have already been using, operating in concert. “Collective effervescence”, sociologist Émile Durkheim’s concept of unity and shared emotional energy generated by communal gatherings, is being used as a commercial mechanism. When individuals participate in shared rites, they transcend their individuality and produce a sense of collective identity. Brand-engineered analogues of this experience — limited-release queuing events, pop-up activations, community-only drops — trigger emotionally charged group experiences reinforcing brand association.

Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory explains the feeling of knowing a brand's quirks and references which confers status on those who possess subcultural capital. Those who "get it" are elevated; those who don't, aspire to. Social identity theory explains that people partly build their sense of self based on groups they belong to, and this feeling is stronger when they are visibly differentiated from outsiders.

For brands, this produces consumers who feel elevated because others do not understand the reference. Gentle Monster commodified this exclusivity as a private joke with their Bratz collaboration. Absurdist references, including the egg packaging, created meaning understandable only to someone fluent in Y2K nostalgia, Korean fashion culture, and internet irony. Especially for Gen Z, this credentialing creates a strong sense of in-group belonging addressing their need for community.

New Balance: a case study in cultural repositioning

Cultural strategy around brand-driven community-building addresses a genuine need rather than manufacturing belonging. 54% of Gen Z favours brands that make them feel part of a community and 84% of this demographic are more likely to purchase from brands perceived as cool.

New Balance's trajectory from ‘dad shoe’ to Gen Z darling is one of the most studied cultural repositioning cases of the 2020s. Starting from $3.3 billion in revenue in 2020, the brand reached $9.2 billion in 2025, while Nike's revenue fell from $51.4 billion to $46.4 billion over a comparable period.

New Balance did not distance itself from the dad shoe aesthetic to appeal to Gen Z, it reframed its 1990s running heritage when nostalgic styles returned to fashion post-COVID. Curating partnerships with Aimé Leon Dore and Kith, whose community-embedded credibility introduced New Balance to younger and more diverse audiences, it also signed younger sports stars like Coco Gauff and Cooper Flagg to reposition the brand. New Balance maintained its authenticity and used cultural intermediaries to reposition it as ‘cool’ for Gen Z.

Department stores as the infrastructure of cultural belonging

We believe department stores have an underutilised asset in today's fragmented market: institutional continuity. While micro-trends evaporate rapidly and pop culture remains volatile, retailers with decades of brand history can provide stability. Rather than participating in fleeting cultural moments, department stores possess the capacity to function as platforms for multiple communities. Despite being commercially driven, department stores can partly fill the vacuum left by the demise of cultural gatekeepers that allowed the formation of a mass culture. They can strategically define and build on what authenticity looks like for their consumer base, knowing that its impact may not be fully quantifiable especially in the short term. This potential was exemplified by Le Bon Marché’s rock and roll exposition, which fostered intergenerational cultural engagement and shared experiences unintentionally.

The transition from a transactional environment to a cultural hub is quantified in the value of a department store’s retail media network. Culturally resonant networks offer brands an avenue to connect with increasingly rare attentive audiences, elevating a secondary revenue stream for department stores into an asset built upon cultural capital. Behavioural nudges and individualised AI recommendation systems only succeed if consumers are engaged in noticing them. As trust in conventional advertising wanes and AI systems intercept direct searches, capturing consumer focus requires broader relevance than personalisation.

Retailers like Gentle Monster and New Balance built rituals that resonated with communities aligned with what these brands strive to represent, letting influence flow from a sense of belonging. Department stores can leverage their unique institutional continuity to provide a focal point for communities to organise naturally in an increasingly individualised environment.

Credits: IADS (Anchita Ranka)