Behavioral Strategy

Behavioral Strategy is an emerging field that merges behavioral science with strategy design. It starts by validating real user problems and behaviors, then builds products, services, or programs around them.

Key Insight

Across case studies in tech, health, and finance, embedding behavioral interventions during the planning phase consistently outperforms intuition-driven or reactive solutions.

These performance gains emerge repeatedly in published case studies and practitioner reports.

The Behavioral Strategy Hierarchy

Behavioral Strategy defines four foundational “fits” essential for strategic success:

  1. Problem Market Fit: Ensuring users actively experience and seek solutions to a clearly defined problem.
  2. Behavior Market Fit: Matching user behaviors precisely to the validated problem.
    It represents the evidence-backed match between a target behavior and a real-world problem.
  3. Solution Market Fit: Identifying and validating the optimal solution—whether a product, service, or intervention—that effectively enables and scales the desired behaviors.
  4. Product Market Fit (when applicable): Specifically validating that a market-ready product successfully meets user needs and sustainably supports target behaviors.

This sequence is at the heart of several frameworks—including our DRIVE playbook—but remains free for anyone to adapt.

Heuristic: Verify Problem Market Fit, then Behavior Market Fit, and finally Solution Market Fit (or Product Market Fit if your solution is specifically a product).

Why Behavioral Strategy Matters

Most products, services, or strategic initiatives fail due to misalignment with human behavior and insufficient problem validation. Traditional approaches often overlook how target customers naturally behave or whether they genuinely seek a solution, resulting in low adoption and minimal impact.

Behavioral Strategy ensures alignment between business objectives, real user problems, and achievable behaviors, dramatically increasing the likelihood of achieving lasting strategic success.

Note on Licensing

Behavioral Strategy is intentionally open. All core concepts on this site are shared under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
DRIVE is a trademark of Jason Hreha; feel free to reference it with attribution.

Practical Steps

  1. Define measurable objectives explicitly.
  2. Clearly identify your target user. (See the Target User Definition step)
  3. Conduct comprehensive behavioral research. (Understand the Behavioral Research phase)
  4. Rank behaviors systematically based on impact and feasibility. (Explore Behavior Ranking)
  5. Select and embed behaviors strategically (see the DRIVE framework for one proven approach).

Core Behavioral Strategy Concepts

Practitioners often operationalise these concepts with frameworks such as DRIVE (Define ▸ Research ▸ Integrate ▸ Verify ▸ Enhance) or lighter tools like the Behavior Canvas. Choose what matches your org’s maturity.

Selected Applications (More coming)

Behavioral Strategy has proven transformative across multiple industries:

  • Technology: Instagram achieved massive growth after pivoting from check-ins to photo sharing, exemplifying perfect Behavior Market Fit (Technology Case Study).
  • Healthcare: Innovative vaccine approaches considering psychological barriers can substantially reduce vaccine hesitancy (Healthcare Application).

Getting Started

Start embedding Behavioral Strategy into your strategic decisions today:

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