MRS Healthy Living Conference

We enjoyed attending the MRS Healthy Living Conference last week, and discussing the gamut of trends, challenges and opportunities facing businesses in the health and wellness sector.

We were delighted to lead an interactive workshop session about the difficulties of creating real and lasting healthy behaviours. Specifically, we explored a challenge that many of us have grappled with – reducing sugar intake.

Self-funded research revealed three broad approaches to dealing with sugar:

• ‘Controlling’, choosing to adopt a healthy balance
• ‘Avoiding’, giving up sugar completely
• ‘Disengaging’, ignoring the issue.

We focused in on this last consumer behaviour, and asked our audience of health and wellbeing experts to help us to answer  the challenge : ‘how can we break through this disengagement?’

Our workshop involved a programme of  exercises structured around our behaviour change model, a framework that distils behavioural theory and enables its practical application, to dig deeper into the underlying behavioural biases and to generate ideas for interventions.

Our delegates identified several opportunities to create interventions that would change behaviour.  These included:

• Creating a ‘sugar free Bake Off’, tapping into social norms and affect biases to make sugar-free more engaging, achievable and part of the culture.
• Partnering with supermarkets to add clarity to food labelling, inspired by the self-efficacy bias whereby people need to feel that their sugar-management goals are within their capabilities and their grasp.

The process we went through in the Workshop is one that we regularly use with clients, working from our Behaviour Change model to spark creative thinking to identify the how to tackle a range of behavioural challenges and help them unlock the opportunity of changing behaviour.

If you have a behavioural issue that you are facing, please get in touch. We would be happy to share the insight behind our behaviour change model and work with you to unlock the challenges you face in your business.