Health Inertia: Breaking the Cycle

This past month was a time to reflect on mental health. Since 1949, May has been known as Mental Health Awareness Month. And nothing has impacted our collective mental and emotional well-being more than the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing, isolation, anxiety, fear, and more have wreaked havoc on nearly all segments of society, from young children to the elderly.

The care and keeping of our mental health are far too easy to ignore. Like our physical health, we know we should meditate, exercise, take breaks, go on vacation, do therapy, etc. People have the information and still, they're not motivated nor inspired to take care of themselves.

At Wunderman Thompson Health, we often discuss health inertia, as it pertains to the healthcare consumer, through the lens of physical well-being. As we look to inspire healthy behavior change, mental health must not be ignored, especially during a pandemic.

While COVID brought healthcare to the center of all our lives, rather than making it a priority, it created new inertia issues: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looking at a nationwide sampling of patient data during the summer of 2020 found that about 41% of American adults either delayed or altogether avoided medical care because of COVID-19 concerns. An estimated 32% delayed or avoided routine care, while 12% delayed or avoided emergency care. Even by January 2021, according to a JAMA Health Forum survey, “office visits were still below expected levels by around 5%, maybe even more, despite the fact that during the winter there was a surge.”

 Before COVID-19 stopped the world in its tracks, the vast majority of people, both healthy and not, said they were making good enough health decisions and don’t need to change. They also said they are happy with the health information available to them—but that information appears to be lulling them into a false sense of security rather than inspiring them to take better care of themselves.

Why are human beings so prone to what we call health inertia? Part of the reason lies in our psychological makeup. We’re wired with coping mechanisms that help us survive—but these very mechanisms also lead us to be overly optimistic and rationalize poor choices: “I’ll get that skin screening next year”; “I’m doing okay without my asthma medication, so I’ll skip it”; or, “He smokes a pack a day, but I’m down to a pack a week, so my habit’s not so bad.”

This is the challenge of Health Inertia: If people believe they’re doing fine, despite a surfeit of information—and evidence—to the contrary, how can we get them to consider their health more realistically and commit to long-term actions that will actually improve their lives?

Getting motivational means getting much more personal.

The healthcare industry has done a good job educating people but a poor job motivating them to take action. Traditional content, often information about a particular medical condition or treatment, does not address the different motivations people have for doing something or the many emotions they experience as they try, often in fits and starts, to make healthy changes in their lives. So, now, it’s on us as health marketers to change the very way we’re communicating by getting more personal—much more personal than we have in the past.

Here are the things every marketer must do to break the cycle of inertia.

Make motivation the foundation for all content

Behavioral science research and advanced analytics should be a standard part of marketing practice. At Wunderman Health, we call this approach Motivation Mapping. It's a process that rapidly and cost-effectively digs deep into people's motivations and segments them accordingly. We typically find that people cluster around three to four motivations, paving the way for brands to reach their targets with streams of content tailored to inspire

Pull different emotional levers to effect long-term change

Playing to people’s fears tended to shock them into an immediate commitment to act, while content that elicited positive emotions like joy and hope bolstered thought. To spark and sustain action, marketing campaigns must expose people to a sequence of motivational content that strikes different emotional chords over a period of time.

Test and fail fast

In past research, we’ve gotten motivations wrong—and learned from them. For instance, a group of people we thought was motivated by a fear of being stigmatized socially was actually motivated by a desire to belong—to form intimate relationships and make others happy. This finding underscores the importance of continually learning about audiences and refining content accordingly. Had this been a real campaign, we would have used this insight to quickly modify the content.

Make action the new KPI—we can’t afford health inertia

We should no longer measure success with metrics like clicks and impressions alone. Instead, we must look at how people are responding to content on an emotional level—by using new platforms like facial recognition software to assess cognitive responses—and how we are affecting people’s healthcare choices. We should gauge success by measuring real action, both immediate and that taken over longer periods of time.

Every day the stakes get higher. As healthcare spending continues to rise, as the pipeline of resources designed to make us better stewards of our own health grows, and as the financial responsibility for good health increasingly falls on individuals, every stakeholder in the healthcare ecosystem will rely on the partners who can shake the mantle of health inertia and inspire action.

Wunderman Thompson Health is now fielding our 2021 study. The Health Inertia Report will be released in early summer.