What Pharma Commercial and Insights Leaders Can Learn from Jeep Owners (Yes, Really)

Recently, while driving my younger daughter home from the karate studio, we started talking about what kind of car she might like to drive when the time comes. Without missing a beat, she said, “A Yellow Jeep.” Not because of its legendary off-road capability or rugged engineering—she doesn’t plan on rock crawling anytime soon—but because of the dashboard. More specifically, because Jeep dashboards often feature an eclectic collection of rubber ducks and other whimsical adornments.

It turns out there’s a whole culture among Jeep owners around “ducking”—leaving small rubber ducks on other Jeeps as a kind of insider greeting or acknowledgment. What my daughter was responding to wasn’t just the car; it was the community, the sense of identity, the customization, and the personality expressed through small acts of ownership.

As someone who is constantly curious about behavioral science and business strategy, I couldn’t help but reflect on how this kind of ritualized personalization maps directly onto habit formation—and how relevant that is to our work in pharmaceutical and biotech marketing and marketing research.

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Habits Aren’t Just About Repetition

When we talk about habit formation, whether in healthcare, other industries, or really any type of repeat behavior, we often focus on the classic cue-behavior-reward loop. This model explains a lot about why HCPs continue to prescribe certain treatments: it’s easy, it fits their workflow, and it tends to yield reliable results.

But this model is incomplete. As Nir Eyal and others have explored, another key dimension of habit strength is investment—the degree to which someone puts something of themselves back into a product, making it their own. Customization strengthens habit because it creates emotional attachment, a feeling of ownership, and often, a degree of professional pride. Indeed, I would argue that learning how to fix or maintain something (technically, mechanically) creates an even stronger sense of attachment.

Jeep owners don’t just buy a car. They build a statement. They decorate, modify, and even name their vehicles. That vehicle becomes an extension of self—and as such, harder to part with. Those who know how to fix their Jeeps (or their Toyota Tacomas, etc.) feel even more strongly about them - I know several especially loyal Jeep and Taco loyalists.

Physicians, perhaps unknowingly, do something similar with medications.

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Medical Customization: A Quiet, Unseen Form of Brand Loyalty

When I conduct market research with physicians, especially around understanding drivers and barriers for incumbent treatments, I’ve begun asking a new kind of question:

“How have you made this treatment your own?”

The answers vary, but the patterns are clear. A physician may have discovered a preferred way to titrate the dose, a nuanced way to explain the mechanism of action to a hesitant patient, or a proactive strategy to manage side effects. These small acts of customization represent investment.

This investment leads to inertia—not in a negative sense, but in the sense that changing behavior becomes genuinely difficult. It’s not just about being comfortable; it’s about expertise. Once a physician feels they’ve “mastered” a therapy, they’re reluctant to start over with a new one.

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Implications for Strategy: Understand the Hidden Anchors

For commercial leaders and insights professionals in pharma and biotech, this insight should be a call to arms. Too often, we approach market understanding through the lens of features, benefits, barriers, and unmet needs. But we may not necessarily investigate how deeply a treatment has been personalized by its prescribers.

If a doctor has built workarounds, patient communication scripts, and dosing nuances around a specific treatment, we’re not just asking them to switch brands—we’re asking them to unlearn a system they’ve helped create. That’s a far higher bar.

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The Path Forward: Create Opportunities for Personalization

So what can be done? How can new treatments break through this hidden layer of loyalty?

1. Enable Customization Provide flexibility in how a treatment can be used—dosing options, titration ranges, adjunctive care pathways. But more than that, highlight stories of how other physicians have tailored the use of the treatment to their own patient populations.
2. Identify Investment Points In research, probe beyond the standard “why do you use this product?” and ask “how have you made this yours?” Understand the rituals, language, and processes physicians have built around a medication. These are the things that hold behavioral gravity.
3. Celebrate HCP Ingenuity When designing materials for medical affairs or peer education, include authentic stories of how physicians innovate within the boundaries of appropriate use. This reinforces the idea that personalization is not only acceptable—it’s valued.
4. Lower the Cost of Transition If a new medication asks a physician to give up an existing workflow, give them a new one. Provide training, patient education tools, and digital aids that allow them to rebuild their ecosystem (and sense of expertise) quickly.

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From Ducks to Dosing: The Psychology Is the Same

The story of the rubber duck on the Jeep dashboard is cute—but it’s also telling. When people invest in something emotionally, even through small gestures, they develop a sense of attachment that makes their relationship with the product deeper and more durable.

In medicine, the stakes are higher, the gestures more subtle, and the motivations more complex. But the underlying psychology remains remarkably consistent.

So as you think about your next brand strategy, don’t just ask how your product solves a problem. Ask how it might become something a physician can own, adapt, and make a part of their clinical identity.

Because in the end, behavioral change in medicine is less about convincing—and more about co-creating.