Defining the Behavior You Want to Change

Author: Rhona Auckland, Associate Director, Beyond Behavior, Beyond Blue

Picture the scene, you’ve set clear strategic objectives, your market research partner has built in a behavioral science component, something like COM-B or EAST or the Health Belief Model.  So, it should logically follow that the project will deliver meaningful, strategically relevant behavioral insight, right?

Not always.

Taking stock of the behavior change challenge

At Beyond Behavior, we often see one critical step being missed: taking the time to define the specific behavior that needs to change. Too often, teams jump straight into exploring drivers and barriers before agreeing what action they are trying to influence, in which context, for which audience, and at what point in the decision journey. That distinction matters. Without a clearly defined behavior change goal, market research will deliver insights that are interesting but not necessarily actionable.  

A familiar pattern?

Amongst all the excitement of getting a project up and running, could you be missing a critical opportunity to pause and align on the specific behavior(s) you are looking to change?

Request for Proposals (RfPs), proposal discussions, and project kick-off calls tend to be weighted towards outputs. Topics naturally cover key questions like: 

• What will success look like? 
• When are the key milestones? 
• What’s the most efficient way to deliver? 

Core research objectives are, of course, central to these discussions, but we often see that the behavior change elements are poorly defined, with vague language such as “increase uptake”, “drive preference”, “improve adherence”, rather than a clearly articulated change in a specific behavior.  

Then, as market researchers and brand insight teams, our curiosity can often lead us to jump straight into the details of the exploratory work at hand. We’re excited and motivated to get into the minds of customers; to understand their individual and external drivers; to delve into attitudes and beliefs, the influence of peers, environment, and cultural context; to look for patterns and themes. This is the interesting bit, the exploration of the “how” and the “why”, but has the “what” been missed?

How often are you taking the time to ask the foundational question: what behavior are you trying to change?

Why defining the behavior you want to change matters

That question, “what behavior are you trying to change?”, can feel deceptively simple. Defining the specific behavioral challenge a brand faces seems like an obvious starting point, yet in practice, it is often glossed over too quickly. 

Behavioral science is ultimately about understanding how to shape specific actions in ways that make the desired outcome more likely. That means its value depends on a clear, shared view of the behavior you are trying to change.

Let’s explore two different research scenarios.

Scenario A: Let’s say the business challenge is slower-than-anticipated uptake of recently launched Product X. From the kick-off meeting, you’ve aligned on the need to understand how to “increase uptake of Product X” among your target customers. This will likely lead you to a standard and often robust set of questions regarding Product X, namely its perceptions, barriers to its prescription, and the types of messaging or data that could increase its appeal. This would generate a deliverable that provides a focused view on opportunities and leverage points to increase overall uptake of Product X. Job done, right? 

Scenario B: Let’s take the same business challenge but strengthen the objective. This time, the research is designed around the need to understand how to “encourage physicians to prescribe Product X at the first signs of disease progression, instead of continuing the current standard of care.”  

It might seem subtle, but this objective has a layer of specificity that can change the course of your research (for the better!). For example: 

• Tailoring recruitment more thoughtfully. Rather than allowing natural fallout, you might intentionally include a mix of those already demonstrating the desired behavior (e.g., early-line prescribing of Product X) vs. those who are only prescribing at later lines or not at all.  This would enable you to compare and contrast the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of different customer types, potentially revealing influential factors you can leverage to shift customers up the adoption ladder. 

• The discussion also becomes more focused. Instead of a general exploration of barriers, you can examine the specific decision points in the disease pathway where adoption is being enabled, delayed, or missed. For example, you can explore: 
  • The beliefs, attitudes, and mental shortcuts shaping physician decision-making today
  • What might be anchoring physicians to the standard of care
  • Which decisions are genuinely autonomous, versus those that are constrained by external factors (access, guidelines, etc.), and how that varies across the different levels of adoption in your sample
  • The role of social norms, peer influence, and professional pressures 
  • The cues (what physicians would need to see, hear, feel) that may prompt earlier adoption, and what reinforcement is required to maintain this behavior

• Insights move from descriptive to strategically relevant and actionable. The depth of behavioral insight could translate into tailored tactics for different levels of adoption, mapping of behavioral strategies to evidence-backed interventions (e.g., like the behavior change wheel), prioritization of customer groups by the required investment needed to shift behavior… the list goes on. 

Scenario B demonstrates that taking the time to properly define the behavior you want to change can add real value when it comes to research design, analysis, and recommendations. 

That is the role Beyond Behavior strives to play: helping our clients define behavioral challenges clearly. 

Our Beyond Behavior team plays an active role in ensuring that we are working to define behaviors at the RfP stage and work closely with project teams and clients to maintain this integrity throughout the research. 

As behavior change has such broad applications, our role often flexes depending on the project’s needs. In many projects, we work behind the scenes to sharpen behavioral strategy and ensure the research is anchored in the behavior we are trying to influence. In projects with a more explicit behavior focus, Beyond Behavior experts join the core project team, helping to apply evidence-based models and principles in a way that is both commercially relevant and methodologically robust. 

Beyond Behavior helps teams turn broad commercial goals into specific and researchable behavior challenges that feed into actionable behavioral strategies.

If you would like support defining your behavior challenge, understanding which model(s) to apply, and more, we would love to have a chat.