New Year’s resolutions rarely last. Various stats — fewer than 10% of resolutions stick long term, and 80% don’t even last a month — float around the internet. The second Friday in January, unofficially dubbed Quitters Day, marks that inevitable nosedive of our collective motivation. Whatever the exact figure, both data and anecdotal evidence agree: Most resolutions fail.
A large number of us make resolutions anyway. According to a poll conducted Jan. 2 through Jan. 4, 2026, by The Washington Post, nearly half (48%) of American adults made New Year’s resolutions at the start of 2026. We commit to an array of self-improvement schemes, ranging from minor edits to major overhauls, pledging to exercise, save money, read more and ditch our vices, among many others.
This impulse is an example of what psychologists have dubbed “the fresh start effect,” a phenomenon in which people feel more motivated to undertake aspirational lifestyle changes around “temporal landmarks” such as a birthday, the start of a semester or — you guessed it — the new year. These occasions allow us to detach ourselves from our past imperfections (like the abandoned resolutions of years prior) and make us more likely to reflect on our lives from a high-level perspective, which in turn inspires a more aspirational outlook on the future.
This hopeful, forward-looking outlook can help catalyze the formation of new habits, but it can also make us more susceptible to marketing tactics.
We’re motivated but also vulnerable
In terms of retail spending, January tends to be a relatively slower month compared with other months, due to colder weather and tightened post-holiday budgets. In January 2025, for example, consumer spending fell 0.2%, the steepest decline since 2023. To cushion that post-holiday slump, marketers appeal to consumers’ resolution-oriented mindsets.
Planet Fitness was the presenting sponsor of the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square in New York City for the 11th year in a row; language-learning app Babbel captioned a Jan. 1, 2026, Instagram post “New year, new you… new language? 🎰✨”; Casper encouraged its followers to “reset [their] rest this year” while promoting discounts on its mattresses in a Dec. 27, 2025, Instagram post; and meal-delivery service Factor promised to “power your wellness goals with [its] healthiest menu of fresh, nutrient-dense, ready-to-eat meals” on its website.
This marketing appears to work too. A survey conducted from Nov. 4 through Nov. 6 by The Harris Poll on behalf of CIT Bank found that those who made resolutions expected to spend an average of $4,700 in pursuit of those goals. At the same time, respondents who planned to set resolutions cited money-related ones as being a top priority, with a little more than half (55%) of respondents setting some sort of financially related resolution, ranging from saving more money to spending less money to reducing overall debt.
That irony makes it easy to be cynical about the marketing mechanisms that influence our behaviors. How can we sift through the mountain of marketing to figure out what we actually need? Are all resolution-related purchases destined to collect dust in the garage, or will some actually facilitate better long-term habits? We spoke with experts to investigate these questions — and to help you spend your money more wisely in 2026.
How to tell if a purchase will help with a resolution
Many of us might not think we’re susceptible to marketing. We ignore the advertisements that bombard us left and right — the too-good-to-be-true discounts, unrelenting pop-ups, aggressive upselling, shady nickel-and-diming, celebrity endorsements, urgent promos followed by a novel of fine print — but not all marketing is so conspicuous.
One subtler tactic, and a fundamental marketing concept year-round, involves the idea of need recognition. “Before customers are deciding what to do, the customer has to recognize a need that they have,” Jason Riis, founder and CEO of behavioral science consultancy Behavioralize and coauthor of “The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior,” said. “Consumers don’t always realize what their needs are.”
Around the new year, people’s awareness of their needs, goals and desires might be more acute, but still, “sometimes you’ve got to remind them,” Riis said. The upshot is that consumers’ own desires are not necessarily driving them to the product; rather, the product signals what desires — and what resolutions — the consumer should have.
Awareness of the tactics brands employ to leverage your new year mindset is only the first step toward being a more discerning consumer. Unless you’re opting out of shopping altogether, you should know how to identify the purchases that might actually turn intention into action. To help, we’ve compiled a list of questions you should ask yourself before you press “purchase.”
1. Is it realistic?
While the start of a new year can inspire hope and optimism, it can also inflate our sense of possibility to an unrealistic degree. The tension between our expectations and reality can put us at risk of making unwise purchases.
“When we make New Year’s resolutions, we are thinking more in abstract, idealistic terms, not in action terms,” Joshua Lewis, a marketing professor at New York University, said. “There’s a mindset that we have when we decide to commit to these things that’s quite different from the mindset we have when it comes to doing them.”
When we’re coasting on the fresh start effect, we envision our end goal without considering the effort necessary to make that outcome a reality. In our minds, we’re marathoners before we’ve even jogged a mile.
“Hope helps you see things as possible rather than as difficult,” Patti Williams, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said. “It helps you to identify not only the outcome you’re searching for but often the paths that can help you get there.” In other words, when we feel more hopeful about our goals, we’re more likely to invest in the tools to help us achieve them.
Williams further explained that when people feel hopeful they tend to seek out confirmatory information. They won’t go out of their way to consider the impracticality of a particular purchase or anything else that might refute what they already believe. Nor does hope compel us to interrogate the potential gulf between our expectations and reality. Marketers are therefore keen to reinforce our optimistic mindset, using aspirational imagery to sell us a vision of complete lifestyle transformation.
When considering a resolution-related purchase, keep in mind the potential pitfalls of your hopeful mindset and be wary of the ways that marketing appeals to an idealized version of yourself. Give yourself a reality check: Do you really need that expensive cookware set, or do you simply wish you were a chef? A practical purchase is useful to the person you are now, not to a version of yourself that may or may not exist in the future.
2. Does it help form a habit?
Although the fresh start effect offers a boost of motivation around the new year, it’s only temporary. “That little bit of extra motivation is a blessing and a curse,” Riis said. “We can sort of fool ourselves at the beginning of the year.”
Sometimes, certain products might help establish and maintain those behaviors, even when our limited supply of willpower peters out. Riis lays out two key criteria for distinguishing between useful and useless purchases. The first is whether the product helps create a habit. Factors that contribute to habit formation include making the desired action automatic and repeated on a daily or regular basis, with the same context and mindset. Riis’ second criterion concerns the environment in which the desired action is performed. “Is [the product] helping me change my environment, where the good habit that I want to create happens or the bad habit that I want to eliminate happens?”
A key concept with regard to habit formation is friction. In a recent interview with Katy Milkman, Wendy Wood, psychologist and author of “Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick,” defined “friction” as “what gets in the way of us doing a certain thing.” Whether that obstacle is distance, time or effort, friction is a powerful influence on our behaviors, especially when our willpower starts to lag.
Brick, the popular app-blocking device, attempts to exploit this concept of friction to help users reduce their screen time. According to the brand’s website, the Brick device “creates real friction” because it’s a physical object, as opposed to an app, that keeps distractions out of easy reach, making undesirable habits less convenient.
Manipulating the forces of friction in our environment promotes repetition of habit, and repetition itself is a powerful force in maintaining motivation. Anyone who completes the daily Wordle puzzle or tracks their steps, for example, knows the power of maintaining a streak. A study most recently revised in 2023 found that streaks of “goal-consistent behavior” increase the likelihood of persistence toward that goal.
As a general rule, a wise purchase is one that adjusts the friction in your environment, therefore reducing friction for habits you want to foster and increasing friction for the ones you wish to discard. If you struggle to find time to cook, for example, a ready-to-eat meal-delivery service could help you eat more balanced meals in a more timely fashion, or if you hate going to the gym before work, at-home workout equipment might better facilitate morning workouts.
3. Is it a subscription or an upfront payment?
Keeping your resolutions is all about maintaining habits long term, so a useful investment is one that continually encourages ongoing behavior change. If you’re debating a resolution-related purchase, you’d be wise to take into account the payment structure offered (specifically, whether it’s a single upfront payment or a subscription model).
Lewis points out that a company offering its goods and services on a subscription model has a stake in keeping your goals on track, lest you cancel that periodic payment. Consider a fitness program with a recurring monthly fee or a weekly meal-kit service. If you ditch your resolution, the company doesn’t get paid (assuming you don’t forget to unsubscribe). A company offering one-time purchases, however, lacks that same incentive. After all, as Lewis accurately pointed out, “They’ve already got your money.”
We can see this structural difference play out in the marketing tactics different brands use. Headspace, a meditation app offering both monthly and annual subscriptions, encouraged its Instagram followers to “join [its] Take 5 challenge in the Headspace app, where [it was] building the framework for the year ahead.” The emphasis of repeated daily habits demonstrates the way that subscription models can offer foundational systems for behavior change.
On the other hand, marketing for upfront purchases trends more toward urgency and quick fixes. Big-box organization retailer The Container Store wrote this caption in an Instagram reel it posted on Jan. 11, 2026: “If your goal is to get organized for 2026, you NEED this organizer! 👏💙”
Both Headspace and The Container Store appeal to our aspirational selves in hopes of acquiring new customers in the new year, but only Headspace offers a plan to get you there. Its subscription model means it’s not merely concerned with customer acquisition at this moment but also with retaining those customers in the long run.
That said, although payment structure is a crucial consideration, its impact isn’t black-and-white. For example, “the sunk-cost fallacy” — in which people are irrationally averse to abandoning a course of action when they’ve already invested time and resources into it — could support the idea of resolution-related purchases, regardless of payment structure.
“The more you spend on your new resolution, the more costly it is to fail, in a sense,” Lewis said. Quitting your resolutions might feel more expensive, even though the money spent is irrevocable, hence the term “fallacy.” So investing in an expensive machine for at-home espresso might actually help you quit your daily Starbucks habit (although it’ll take a while to see those savings).
On the other hand, investing in your goals could have the potential to backfire, due to the psychological phenomenon known as “the licensing effect.” According to a 2006 study, a virtuous prior choice — such as a practical purchase meant to facilitate some healthy behavior — can then permit (i.e., license) a more indulgent choice. More simply, it’s the “idea that buying something feels like you’ve accomplished the goal, even if you haven’t accomplished the goal,” Williams said. After buying an elliptical, for example, you might feel as if you’ve exercised even when you haven’t.
Riis also acknowledges that financial investment could offer some potential benefit, but he warns against relying on purchases as a form of precommitment. “Merely spending money on behavior change is not nearly sufficient,” he said.
The limitations (and unexpected consequences) of a purchase
If you can analyze the practical potential of an item before you buy it, aware of all the marketing and psychological factors that underpin every purchase, you’re a step closer to achieving your goals without unnecessary spending. Still, even the most pragmatic purchase won’t magically keep your motivation afloat. A new mattress or even a smart alarm clock won’t establish a bedtime routine, while new sneakers or even a treadmill in your basement can’t make you go for a jog.
Whether we realize it or not, we often imagine that achieving goals is a matter of pure internal motivation. We tend to overestimate how much control we have as individuals — and how much willpower we have to expend. We’d be better off shifting our attention to the external factors at play and reframing the concept of goals altogether, not as mere aspirations to be accomplished through sheer force of will but as practical, sustainable systems to integrate into our lives long term.
So before you click “purchase” on another product promising transformation, decide whether it’ll actually impact your day-to-day habits, not just in January but year-round.
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