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By Kristen Mattheessen, Director of Account Management at Suzy.
Every January, the internet fills up with the same message: New year, new you. Big goals mean a total reset for a complete transformation of lifestyles. Thanks to my 2017 “For You” Instagram feed introducing me to Street Parking, an online CrossFit community, my personal January experience hasn’t looked like that in years.
Founded nine years ago by two competitive CrossFit Games athletes, Street Parking is built around a simple idea: more than nothing. Instead of prescribing extreme programs or rigid plans, it focuses on consistency over the motivation-heavy approach that usually defines New Year’s resolutions.
Every January, while most brands are encouraging full lifestyle overhauls, Street Parking runs a “Jump Start” challenge that’s intentionally anti–New Year, New Me. There’s no dramatic transformation promised. The focus is on a few simple, achievable habits: daily movement, steps, water, vegetables. There’s minimal pressure to do it all, just encouragement to show up consistently for four weeks.
Every year, it serves as a reminder that when motivation fades, we don’t suddenly lose our desire to change. We fall to the level of the systems created by our daily habits.
That’s why Quitter’s Day, traditionally January 21, when most people are said to abandon their New Year’s resolutions, has always felt a little misnamed to me. What I see around that time isn’t people quitting. It’s people adjusting.
For market researchers, that distinction matters.
In December, we published a Suzy blog on why New Year’s resolutions fail. This piece is the follow-up. Not about willpower or January optimism, but about what happens after motivation fades, and why that moment is one of the most valuable windows into real consumer (and I’ll argue stakeholder) decision-making.
Quitter’s Day is a research signal, not a punchline
By late January, the pattern is familiar. Gym attendance declines. Kale quietly goes untouched in the back of the fridge. Most resolutions don’t survive the first month. It’s easy to label this as failure. But from a research perspective, this moment isn’t noise, it’s signal.
When goals start to feel too time-consuming, too restrictive, or too disconnected from real life, people don’t abandon the desire for change. They recalibrate what success looks like.
That recalibration is very real for me. My ideal routine of daily workouts, minimal screen time, and perfectly balanced meals doesn’t survive the day-to-day reality of work, parenting, or actual energy levels. If my long-term goal is staying active enough to outrun my toddler well into her teens, my reality looks like working out a few times a week, limiting doom scrolling, and getting vegetables in at lunch and dinner.
That routine isn’t aspirational, Instagram-worthy content, but it’s achievable and, more importantly, repeatable.
Programs like Street Parking are designed around this reality. Motivation will fluctuate, and life will intervene. Instead of fighting that, they create systems that still work when it does. As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, people don’t fail because they lack motivation. They fail when systems don’t support real life. Quitter’s Day is exactly where those systems get exposed.
What consumers reveal when motivation drops
Early January behavior is aspirational. Consumers think in big-picture terms: who they want to be, how they want to feel, and what they want to change.
Late January behavior is different. When motivation drops, decision-making becomes more practical. Consumers start asking:
What can I realistically sustain?
What feels worth the effort right now?
Where can I make progress without burning out?
At this stage, consumers aren’t looking for perfection. They’re looking for options that fit into real life. This is where traditional New Year messaging often breaks down. Language centered on discipline, transformation, or all-or-nothing commitment can feel disconnected once constraints set in. What resonates instead is flexibility, clarity, and permission to adjust.
Why this moment matters for market research
For research teams, this moment should feel familiar.
A new research topic generates excitement. Stakeholders are engaged. There’s energy around the questions you could answer and the decisions the work might inform. Early findings are interesting, directional, and easy to rally around. Then reality sets in.
The work becomes more complex. Timelines stretch. Priorities shift. Stakeholders move on to the next urgent initiative. Even strong insights can lose momentum, not because they aren’t valuable, but because sustaining attention and follow-through is harder than generating initial enthusiasm.
This is the internal corporate version of Quitter’s Day. The same forces that cause consumers to recalibrate their goals show up inside organizations too – just with different constraints, timelines, and stakeholders.
Early-stage research often captures what teams want to explore. Later-stage behavior, both consumer behavior and internal stakeholder behavior, reveals what’s actually feasible to act on. Which questions still matter when timelines tighten. Which insights survive competing priorities. Which findings make it into decisions instead of decks.
Just like consumers, internal teams don’t lose interest because insights aren’t valuable. Momentum drops when insights are hard to absorb, hard to share, or hard to act on.
This is where market research has the opportunity to shift from inspiration to execution.
The gap: Insight exists, action doesn’t always follow
Most teams don’t struggle to generate insights. The harder part is making those insights usable and sustaining visibility across the organization.
We hear this often from customers: “We have great research, but it doesn’t always land when we try to distill the insights down to different stakeholders.”
Insights lose impact when they’re buried in long decks, delivered too late to influence decisions, or difficult to interpret or prioritize across teams.
Just like consumers after Quitter’s Day, internal stakeholders also experience motivation drop-off. Attention narrows. Competing priorities take over. When insights require too much effort to absorb, they stall.
When motivation drops, externally or internally, clarity becomes the difference between action and inertia.
Where Stories fits In
This is where Suzy’s new offering – Stories – plays a critical role.
We often see the same pattern play out: a strong piece of research is delivered in a long deck, discussed once, and then quietly shelved. By the time teams revisit it, priorities have shifted and momentum is gone.
Stories change that dynamic by acting as a repeatable system for insight communication. They’re built on the assumption that motivation and attention will ebb and flow, so insights need a system that keeps them relevant and visible even when momentum dips.
It transforms real consumer data into clear, automated, AI-powered deliverables, including visual infographics and insight summary reports, that keep insights visible, accessible, and usable long after the initial readout.
Instead of relying on one-off presentations, Stories surfaces the key takeaways, visualizes insights clearly, and delivers reports grounded in real consumer responses.
This matters because different teams need insights in different ways. Executives need the headline and implications. Product teams need validation and direction. Creative teams need human context.
Stories adapt insights to those needs so research doesn’t depend on perfect timing, high motivation, or extra effort to be used.
Much like Street Parking’s “more than nothing” approach, Stories reduce friction. They make the next step obvious.
Quitter’s Day Is a pattern, not a moment
Quitter’s Day happens in January, but the behavior it represents shows up all year.
Any time consumers face pressures like economic uncertainty, habit fatigue, or choice overload, the same shift occurs. Any time professionals face pressures like budget constraints, internal systemic realities, and lots of cooks in the kitchen, more of the same. Motivation declines. Attention narrows. Decision-making becomes more practical.
When you look closely at these moments, a few patterns remain consistent. Flexibility keeps people engaged. Tone matters when energy is low. Small wins build momentum because progress feels achievable and visible.
These patterns aren’t dramatic, but they’re durable. And they show up across categories and companies alike.
Brands and teams that perform well in these moments aren’t louder or more inspirational. They’re clearer. They pay attention to what happens after the initial spike, when people adjust instead of dropping off, and how insights are communicated, not just what they say.
Closing: More than nothing still wins
Street Parking works because it aligns with how people actually behave. When motivation fades, it doesn’t demand more. It makes it easier to keep going.
Quitter’s Day reinforces the same idea.
For brands and internal teams alike, the period after Quitter’s Day (January 21st or a few months into a new initiative) offers some of the clearest insight into how people really make decisions. And when those insights are supported by a system that keeps them visible and usable, they don’t fade when motivation drops.
Stories help teams do exactly that. They turn moments of recalibration into clear, actionable narratives that stick, so insights don’t quietly stall out over time.
Learn more about how Stories can take your business to the next level.
