418. IJRM. Habit: Loyalty v. Autopilot.
July 2, 2026
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In this episode, we speak with Ryan Webb, associate professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and director of the Management Data Analytics Lab, about what consumer habit is, and why marketers have been working from a flawed model of it for decades.
Webb's research, developed with a 17-author team spanning neuroscience, psychology, and economics, and published in the IJRM - International Journal of Research in Marketing, challenges the standard economic interpretation of repeat purchase behavior. In economics, buying the same detergent 40 times in a row signals preference. In neuroscience, it may signal something different: an automated behavior that no longer involves active deliberation at all.
Key themes from the conversation:
The jingle fallacy: why economics and neuroscience define "habit" so differently, and what that gap costs marketers who rely on one framework
Context-response associations: how habits form as links between a specific environment and a behavior, and why stability of context matters more than reward frequency
Why product changes carry asymmetric risk for market leaders, with the canned tuna industry as a documented case study
How devaluation works in content consumption, and why viewers keep watching shows that have declined in quality
Habit discontinuity as a targeting opportunity: the life transitions that create windows for new behavior to take hold
Where loyalty programs and algorithmic "buy it again" features sit on the habit-to-preference spectrum
Click here for the Research Article
The Up Next podcast’s access to this content is courtesy of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, an international, double-blind peer -reviewed journal for marketing academics and practitioners. IJRM aims to contribute to the marketing discipline by providing high-quality, original research which advances marketing knowledge and techniques. As marketers increasingly draw on diverse and sophisticated methods, IJRM‘s target audience is comprised of marketing scholars, practitioners (e.g., marketing research and consulting professionals) and policymakers.
IJRM aims to be at the forefront of the marketing field with a particular emphasis on bringing timely ideas to market. The journal embraces innovative research with the potential to spur future research and influence practice. Hence, it welcomes contributions in various aspects of marketing. The editors, while accepting a wide array of scholarly contributions from different disciplinary approaches, especially encourage research that is novel, visionary or path breaking.
Interviewee & Corresponding Author
Dr. Ryan Webb’s research integrates neuroscience, psychology, and economics to provide insight into consumer behavior. He is interested in how choices can be predicted using neural data, how our brains encode and perceive value, and how neural computations influence human (and monkey) choice behavior.
He is an Associate Professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Director of the Management and Data Analytics Lab, and on the editorial board of PNASnexus. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Queen’s University and research fellowships at New York University and the California Institute of Technology.
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International Journal of Research in Marketing
Ryan Webb