The more sociable you are, the more you seek efficiency in health behaviors!? ~The unexpected link between "personality" and "health." Uncovered from Dentsu Inc.'s original wellness survey data of 10,000 people~

Ms. Ako: Interested in healthy eating but struggles to practice it

Ako, 32, has a bright personality and many friends. Her hobbies include going camping with friends and gathering at her favorite spots.

Since entering her 30s, she's started wanting to focus on healthier eating. Hoping to efficiently check her dietary balance, she subscribed to a premium health management app. Now, she receives daily emails introducing healthy ingredients and recipes.

She knows she "should cook more," but her lifestyle involves frequent dining out, and she also wants to focus on something easier to understand and see results from. She just can't seem to put it into practice.

Gradually, I grew tired of being constantly encouraged to do something I couldn't manage, so I stopped using the app altogether.

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Why does this phenomenon occur, where Ako-san's motivation to focus on her body and health gets sapped just as she was getting serious about it?

Reasons Ako couldn't keep using the health management app

We believe one reason is that the actions deemed "correct" for achieving the goal (cooking at home in Ako's case) don't align with Ako's lifestyle or personality.

The health domain is particularly prone to defining textbook "correct actions" clearly. However, simply proposing these seriously makes it surprisingly difficult for someone like Ako, who has no medical issues, to commit to something "solely" for health reasons.

Many people have fundamental desires like "I want to eat what I like when I like!" or "Staying up late playing my favorite games relieves stress!" – "styles" and "emotions" that cannot be overcome by theory alone.

Furthermore, existing personalized recommendations often rely heavily on suggesting similar services based on browsing or purchase history. This makes it hard for the target audience to find unexpected or interesting options, posing a challenge in sparking motivation or interest.

Therefore, in the health domain, we considered that if we could predict an individual's "preferences" regarding health awareness and behavior based on their personality and values, we could make proposals that align closely with their tastes and lifestyle.

Achieving this would mean proposals wouldn't just focus on health benefits (efficacy and effects). The suggested products or activities themselves would feel interesting and enjoyable, naturally leading to behavioral change and its continuation. We envisioned this could ultimately create a world where people's health and happiness levels increase.

Developing an algorithm to predict health awareness and behavioral preferences based on individual personalities and values

With this challenge in mind, Dentsu Inc., ISID, and ISID Business Consulting collaborated to develop a prototype capable of predicting individual health awareness and behavioral preferences.

Leveraging Dentsu Inc.'s annual "Wellness 10,000 Survey" conducted over 15 years and Dentsu Inc.'s proprietary personality and value data, we found that understanding a target's demographic information (age, gender, residence, etc.) and personality/values (presence of 20 basic desires) enables prediction of their health awareness and behavioral preferences.

This prototype specifically validated the ability to predict the following: "I. Health Behavior Preferences (Food-Centered)" and "II. Health Values". (※Only a partial excerpt of prediction items is shown)

For example, through prototype development, we verified that individuals possessing personality traits and values such as "desiring to build good relationships" and "wanting to share feelings" tend to "prioritize efficiency when doing something for health."

Applying this to the opening episode about Ms. A, if we understand her personality traits and values, such as her friendliness, we can predict that she actually "seeks efficiency in health behaviors" and "does not cook for herself."

This allows us to design a personalized recommendation system that prioritizes suggesting "complete nutrition bread" or "Pilates with expert guidance" over "ingredients" or "recipes."

Beyond the above,

1. Add a "nudge phrase" to encourage purchase
2. Predict and recommend "surprising content" that search/purchase history alone struggles to justify
3. and since we can infer why customers purchased products or services, we can also use this to support post-purchase feelings like "I'm glad I bought/used this" or "I want to keep using it."

These perspectives enable deeper engagement with healthcare businesses.

Health, your way. Toward a world where everyone can positively pursue their ideal health.

In this way, by leveraging Dentsu Inc.'s proprietary data, we have verified that personality and values influence health awareness and behavioral preferences. We believe the current predictive model can be applied across a wide range of business operations, from business/product development to communication strategies.

However, it is still under development, with limitations in the number of predictive items and predictive performance. Moving forward, we aim to expand the scope of predictions and improve predictive performance by collaborating with healthcare providers to examine the relationships and linking logic between health awareness, behavioral preferences, habits, and various types of content.

Our goal is to create an environment where individuals can naturally make choices aligned with their personal values and lifestyles within the health domain. We envision a world where people achieve and maintain their desired health states and enrich their lives by engaging in health behaviors suited to them—free from the constraints of health-related sacrifices or obligations—ultimately leading to greater happiness.

We plan to conduct effectiveness evaluations using this predictive model to measure how much it actually contributes to changing health behaviors and how much it improves the health and happiness of our target users.