The Next Frontier for Merchandisers: Taming Consumers’Decision Fatigue

In a consumer economy where affinity groups are increasingly discrete and harder to target efficiently, and machine learning is tapping into the power of each shopper’s data, the retail industry faces a growing challenge that threatens to trump all the others. As technology becomes ever more sophisticated, consumers are increasingly experiencing a phenomenon unique to the modern age: decision fatigue.

Decision fatigue happens when you log on to your favorite streaming service looking for something to watch and, after a half hour of sampling a few dozen trailers, realize you’ve squandered the time you set aside for entertainment and move on to another task. Thousands of possibilities, but nothing to watch?