Walgreens Boots Alliance - A fresh perspective on health behaviour change
WBA
SERVICES: Training
IMPACT AREA: Business Change & Transformation
The Challenge
One aspect of Walgreens Boots Alliance (WBA) service is the development of apps and digital products that support people with chronic health issues.
However, without a detailed understanding of ‘why behaviour change is hard’ - and how to address those challenges, WBA risked designing products that would ultimately fail to gain traction with the target audience of chronic health sufferers.
WBA asked IB to uncover and explain the barriers and drivers to behaviour change for chronic health issues where there is an unmet need for support (e.g. body pain, gut health, mental health) … and to develop an action plan to move consumers towards better long-term health.
Industry Considerations
It was critical that we focused on the application of behaviour change science in a digital context and that the insights had cross-cultural relevance (across the US and UK - for both Walgreens and Boots).
What we did
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We ran an in-depth literature review into health behaviour change, embracing a breadth of sources across academic, government and public health groups, consultancies, charities and existing digital apps.
We used two health behaviour change models from academia to filter evidence, and then combined these two models to create a new psychological framework of change.
We workshopped this bespoke model of change with the WBA team, bringing each concept and technique to life with engaging examples from the real world.
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Long term behaviour change is a challenging and complex process with high failure rates, but
correctly applied behaviour change techniques can help people to overcome those challenges and make change easier.
While there are many models of behaviour change out there, no single model is perfect, and combining learnings from multiple models can give a richer and more holistic picture of behaviour change.
The complexity of the academic study of behaviour change can be presented within an engaging, easy-to-understand and actionable resource that can help shape commercial decisions in the future.
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The new WBA behaviour change framework was immediately used to help evolve in-flight propositions, and IB continues to consult on their digital development.
The workshop deck is a lasting tool that will live-on and inspire the WBA team, fulfilling our purpose of putting psychology at the heart of our clients’ businesses.
We were developing behaviour change products, but needed the confidence to know we were doing the right thing. The IB team developed a bespoke model that met our business needs and ran interactive workshops to embed the knowledge within our international team. As a consequence we have a proposition development team able to confidently evaluate product and service proposals against a framework of behaviour change techniques. This project has given us a trusted partner in IB.