Not All Attention Is Equal.

Nick Gray
Jul 23
6 min read

If you are in retail you’ll know it's always evolving and changing, and right now the idea of “getting noticed” has become a high-stakes game and one that’s often measured in metrics that don’t mean as much as we think they do. Clicks, impressions, foot traffic, open rates, screen time. These are the signals that a lot of us in retail have been taught to chase. But the truth is, visibility is no longer the same as value.

We are at a place and have been here for sometime where just because someone walked into your store doesn’t mean they were ever truly present. Just because they scrolled your content doesn’t mean they felt anything. In a landscape that is noisier, faster, and more fragmented than ever before, it’s no longer enough to be seen. In today's world you need to matter and to matter, we have to and need to understand attention not as a number, but as a state.

A recent global study (7,000 consumers surveyed, including 3,000 from the U.S.) helped me make sense of this. It helped bring to life a concept that retail needs to urgently absorb: not all attention is created equal. Some forms of attention are passive, fragmented, and fleeting. Others are intentional, focused, and full of potential. And the difference between the two? It shows up in spend, loyalty, and long-term brand value.

Focused on the Wrong War: Why Retail Is Chasing the Least Valuable Metric

Let’s start with a confronting fact or truth, we’ve been measuring the wrong things. Most retailers still build strategies around how many people they can reach, how long they can keep them engaged, or how often they can get them to return. But time on site, like time in a queue, isn’t inherently valuable. What matters is what happens within that time.

If we simply map this across different experiences like concerts, books, video games, live sport, podcasts, shopping centres, the pattern becomes pretty obvious. The most immersive, emotionally charged, and purpose-driven moments command higher value. In media, for instance, a high-focus, live experience can generate up to A$50 per hour, while low-engagement activities like streaming music or listening to radio hover closer to A$0.15–$0.20 per hour.

Ok so now lets translate that to retail. A considered, emotionally resonant store visit where a customer engages deeply with your brand story, product curation, and staff… that hour is worth exponentially more than five hours of low-focus scrolling through your online catalogue.

Focus + Intent = Value

The real breakthrough here is understanding that attention is best measured through two core factors: how focused someone is, and why they’ve shown up in the first place.

When someone walks into your store, or lands on your site, ask yourself:

Are they focused, or are they just killing time?
Are they here to enjoy something they love, solve a problem, connect, escape, or pass the time away?
Does the way you’ve structured your environment help them achieve that goal, or is it distracting from it?

It turns out that when someone is highly focused, their likelihood to spend jumps significantly. According to the study, a 10% rise in average focus leads to an increase of around 17% in overall spend. And consumers in the top bracket of focus spend twice as much as those in the bottom.

This isn’t just interesting anymore, it’s operationally critical. While attention can feel like a fuzzy thing to track, it's more observable than we think. You’re already seeing signs of it every day, how long someone stays, what they touch, where they pause, whether they look up or tune out. But the key shift is recognising that attention isn't just about time, it's about state. What was their intent? Were they immersed, or just passing through? When you start layering emotional purpose over customer behaviour, you stop chasing traffic and start understanding attention.

The Myth of the Super User

Retailers often celebrate their “super users”, those who visit most often or engage with the brand constantly. But quantity of interaction does not equal quality of attention. There's only a fraction of high-volume users that are also high-value spenders. Some might have your store bookmarked or walk through your doors every week, but do so absentmindedly, without urgency and without intent. They’re not your future, they’re your inertia.

In contrast, the real value lies with those that arrive focused, ready, and emotionally primed. These are your “super attention” customers. They might visit less, but when they do, they engage hard. They are way more likely to purchase, more likely to remember, and far more likely to return with purpose.

The Jobs we Need to do in Retail

There are five core “reasons” people consume content, what I call emotional jobs. They are:

To enjoy something they love
To learn or gather information
To connect socially
To relax or unwind
To create background ambience

Retail plays in all five, but few brands are clear on which one they’re truly serving. If you’re a luxury brand, chances are your customers are most likely here for love, they adore your world, your storytelling, your craft. A premium electronics store might sit in the education category. A fast fashion retailer may cater to light entertainment, while a grocer or chemist often serves as background function.

None are in any way wrong. But each demands a different rhythm, aesthetic, emotional register, and merchandising flow. Misalign the job to be done with the customer’s state of mind, and you’ll feel it instantly in bounce rate, hesitation, cart abandonment, or even worse, indifference and complete lack of interest.

Designing for Attention: What the Best Are Doing

Retailers who outperform in this attention economy are doing a few things slightly different. They will

Treat emotional states as seriously as foot traffic or sales targets
Design stores around intention, not just layout
Measure quality of interaction, not just time
Build teams who can create resonance, not just provide service

They understand that the store is not just a distribution channel (Hasn't been for a long time) it’s a medium, and like any medium, it either earns attention or wastes it. That’s why some of the highest-performing retail environments are also the most human, tactile, and emotionally immersive. They engage senses. They respect time and correctly reward curiosity.

Segmenting by Feeling, Not Just Demographics

One of the smartest shifts you can make in retail now is to move away from traditional segmentation (age, gender, income) toward psychographic and behavioural attention states.

Three high-value customer profiles that will stand out for you will be:

Lovers of content and experience: These are our omnivores. They binge on culture, story, entertainment. We just need to give them worlds to dive into.
Interactivity seekers: Highly engaged, opinionated, social. These are the guys that love games, feedback, customisation. So you need to involve them.
Community creators: These are your extroverts, sharers and enthusiasts. They’ll absolutely champion your brand if it gives them something worth spreading.

Each of these groups brings more than just money, they bring meaningful, resonant attention and the kind that scales emotionally, not just numerically.

Rethinking Retail KPIs

So what do we do with all of this? This is something I've already been helping retail teams shift from, moving from metrics that measure presence to metrics that measure presence of mind.

Some of the best questions a retail leader can now ask:

Are we winning high-quality attention, or just collecting bodies?
Is our brand clear on which emotional job we’re fulfilling?
Have we designed our experience to match that intention?
Are we measuring the state our customers are in, not just where they are?

The future of retail is not going to be won by brands that chase attention. It's going to be won by brands that earn it, deserve it, and know exactly what to do with it when they have it.

The wrap up:

If you are in retail you're not in the visibility business anymore. You’re in the emotional investment business. And in that business, the most valuable thing you can create isn’t content, inventory, or campaign reach. It’s a moment of deep, human attention, presence and on purpose, in the right state and for the right reason.

Let’s stop shouting so much and start resonating instead.