The Planned Impulse: What FOMO and Social Proof Reveal About Romanian Shoppers in 2026
Only about 6% of Romanians name influencers as a trusted source when choosing what to buy online. At the same time, 58.3% admit they've bought a product specifically because they saw it promoted on social media, according to the same 2025 eCommerce study.
That gap between what Romanian shoppers say moves them and what actually moves them is the real story behind emotional purchasing in 2026. Urgency and the visible behavior of other buyers operate underneath a layer of stated rationality that most people genuinely believe about themselves, whether or not they'd ever describe their own shopping that way.
Executive Summary
Nearly three in four Romanians who shop online say social media influences their purchase decisions, even though trust in influencers as a category remains low.
Romania's influencer marketing industry reached €112 million in 2025, growing almost fivefold since 2020, with live shopping expected to expand further this year.
Black Friday 2025 showed Romanian shoppers moving from spontaneous impulse toward planned, researched purchasing, without the underlying urgency disappearing.
Reviews and user-generated content now carry more weight with shoppers than a brand's own marketing, in Romania and globally.
For retailers, the opportunity sits less in chasing viral moments and more in making sure in-store execution holds up the trust that social proof builds online.
A Market That Says One Thing and Does Another
The Romanian data on this is unusually clear. Nearly three out of four Romanians who shop online say social media shapes their purchase decisions, according to a study by United Media Services. Yet when the same shoppers are asked directly what they trust when choosing a product, influencers rank near the bottom, with just over 6% naming them as a trusted source, while 58.3% separately admit to buying something purely because they saw it promoted on social media, according to the eCommerce study cited above.
Emotional decision-making usually works exactly like this. People rationalize a purchase after the fact, and the rationalization rarely mentions the fifteen-second video that put the product in front of them in the first place.
The industry behind that dynamic keeps growing regardless. Romania's influencer marketing market reached €112 million in 2025, nearly five times its size in 2020, with over 8,200 companies running campaigns and live shopping named as one of the formats expected to grow fastest this year, according to Revista Biz.
FOMO Doesn't Need to Feel Urgent to Work Anymore
Black Friday 2025 offers a useful test case for how this is evolving. According to a study by Starcom Romania, 84% of Romanians intended to buy something during the event and 79% actually did, a 94% conversion rate that the agency read as a sign of maturing, planned consumer behavior rather than pure impulse, according to Revista Biz.
That framing is accurate as far as it goes, but it misses something. Planning around Black Friday doesn't remove the emotional driver behind it. It just moves the fear of missing out earlier in the timeline, from the day of the sale to the weeks of anticipation before it. Shoppers now research, compare, and build a wish list in advance precisely so they're ready the moment the discount appears, arguably a more disciplined version of the same urgency rather than the absence of it.
Global data backs up how much that urgency still matters once a shopper is actually facing a deal. Limited-time offers can lift sales by more than 300%, and 52% of people report having made an impulse purchase directly because of a FOMO-style ad, according to Shapo's 2026 FOMO research. Younger consumers show this most sharply. 60% of millennials say they'll buy something within 24 hours of feeling FOMO, and 40% of Gen Z admit to overspending just to keep pace with friends.
Why a Stranger's Review Now Outweighs a Brand's Own Words
Social proof, the second engine behind emotional purchasing, works differently than FOMO but points in the same direction. Consumers increasingly trust the visible behavior and opinions of other buyers over anything a brand says about itself. Only 14% of shoppers say they'd trust an AI-generated recommendation on its own, according to Salsify's 2026 Consumer Research Report, while ratings and reviews now outrank even recommendations from friends and family as the single most influential factor in a purchase decision, according to PowerReviews' 2025 research.
That shift matters for retailers because it relocates where trust actually gets built. A brand's own advertising carries less of that weight now. Most of it sits instead in what a stranger left in a review or what other shoppers in the same store seem to be reaching for at the same time.
Where This Plays Out at the Shelf
None of this is confined to social media. Impulse purchases still account for up to 62% of supermarket sales, and in some categories that figure reaches 80%, with roughly 80% of all impulse buying still happening in physical stores rather than online, according to Webtribunal's 2026 impulse buying research. Checkout aisles, end caps, and secondary placements remain some of the most emotionally reactive real estate a store has, working through the same visibility and urgency that drive behavior online.
This is where in-store execution either reinforces the emotional pull or quietly cancels it out. A flash promotion that isn't visible from the main aisle loses most of its urgency. A secondary placement that's understocked halfway through the day tells a shopper the deal wasn't real in the first place. Secondary Placement Analytics and Mystery Shopping exist to catch this kind of gap between what a campaign was designed to do and what a customer actually encounters walking down the aisle.
Store 360 audits add the operational layer underneath all of it. A product can be trending online, backed by reviews, and pushed by every creator a brand can afford, and still underperform in a specific store if the shelf is empty, the price tag doesn't match the app, or the display looks abandoned rather than curated.
What This Means for Retail Performance
Romanian consumers haven't become less emotional. They've become better at disguising it, even from themselves, as research and restraint. For retailers and brands, the practical takeaway has less to do with chasing every viral trend or urgency tactic harder, and more to do with making sure that once social proof and FOMO have done their job of getting someone interested, the store doesn't undo that work with a shelf that's out of stock, a price that doesn't match what they saw online, or a display that never got set up the way it was planned.
At Retail Data Monitoring, that gap between what a campaign promises and what a store delivers is exactly what we measure, store by store, before it costs a sale.
