Driving systemic behaviour change, one step at a time with COM-B

Introduction

Senior Insight Consultant at Bryter, Katie Aylward discusses her recent application of the COM-B behaviour change model, and why it’s a powerful tool for driving meaningful and effective behaviour change strategies for our clients.

In 2024 I had the privilege of working on a project about understanding what was holding back sports coaching participation in historically underrepresented groups, and how we can encourage participation behaviours.

Behaviour arises from the interplay between culture and cognitive biases, and models like COM-B delve into the hidden drivers of behaviour. Having seen Bryter successfully apply COM-B in multiple sectors (e.g. healthcare, telco, gaming, and consumer tech) for challenges aimed at changing long term behaviour, it was perfect for this project.

COM-B, a behaviour change model, says that behaviour is the result of three interlinked influencers;

Capability (e.g. the ability to enact a behaviour, or can I do this)
Opportunity (e.g. the environment that enables/hinders a behaviour, or do I have the opportunity to do this)
Motivation (e.g. reflective and automatic mechanisms that activate/inhibit behaviour, or do I want to do this)

COMB (1)

Michie, Susan & van Stralen, Maartje & West, Robert. (2011). The Behaviour Change Wheel: a new method for characterising and designing behaviour change interventions. Implementation science: IS. 6. 42. 10.1186/1748-5908-6-42.

COM-B offers a tangible way to disrupt and change behaviours

Once we have identified the different factors that make up each of the three influencers, we can develop effective strategies which tackle the barriers to behaviour change in each.

In marcomms and targeting strategies, COM-B will not only guide the development of a wider market approach to driving behaviour change, but will also provide tailored sets of recommendations for different target audiences.

On paper, COM-B seems a simple enough structure to follow. But unsurprisingly, research is never simple and there were plenty of learnings.

Going into it, it felt like this could be something of a passion project for me; I’m a keen (borderline obsessive) sportswoman and have also played team sports my whole life, so the subject area felt particularly resonant. Coupled with the chance to work on something that had tangible positive societal implications, I couldn’t wait to get started.

This is what I learnt along the way:

1. A successful COM-B strategy needs a defined ‘Behavioural Transformation Challenge’
The Behavioural Transformation Challenge is the target behaviour that we are trying to get to. Defining the Behavioural Transformation Challenge is the crucial first step when using COM-B. This gives the project an anchor point to aid the research design, including hypotheses generation, design of research materials, interpretation of data and final recommendations.

2. Be intentional and collaborative in the design phase with COM-B
When designing the research, the key to the project’s success was a collaborative process with the wider client team. Distilling COM-B in a way that was accessible and meaningful for everyone in the team was crucial in being able to action recommendations post-project. Additionally, because it gives us a checklists of sorts to adhere to, a collaborative process meant that we ensured diversity of thought, challenged each other’s biases and minimised blind spots in the research design and interpretation of results.

3. COM-B doesn’t oversimplify complex human behaviour and allows tailored strategy development
As we all know, human behaviour does not neatly fit into binary categories, and trying to categorise people’s lived experiences initially might seem like it could be a challenge. But what COM-B does is give us clear guidelines on how to successfully segment behaviour into each of the three influencers; it breaks down broad influencers of behaviour into more specific elements (e.g. the sub-influencers).

This provided us with a rich and in-depth understanding of our audience, in the case of our project, the core cultural and societal issues that impact underrepresented groups. It also proved incredibly effective when developing behaviour change strategies, allowing us to drill down into how to change the conditions of each influencer.

By setting our Behavioural Transformation Challenge and working intentionally and collaboratively with our client, they are now reshaping their approach to comms strategy and execution. More importantly, I’m excited to see more people form underrepresented groups taking up sports coaching.

Want to know more?

Bryter works with a broad range of audiences to understand their behaviours, motivations, needs and experiences. This insight helps brands and businesses to better understand what is shaping and influencing consumer behaviour.

Our expertise spans a wide range, allowing us to provide clients with a comprehensive range of services.