The strange thing about working in zero-awareness categories is that the bottleneck is almost never demand. The bottleneck is language.
When we launched the HPV vaccine programme at PFH, the first six weeks of the work was almost entirely a writing exercise. Not advertising copy — that came later. Just the question of what sentence a 28-year-old woman would say to herself, in her own head, that would let her think of this as a thing she should do this month. The standard pharma framing — protect yourself, the statistics — gave her a sentence about disease. We needed a sentence about timing.
What surprised me was how durable the right sentence was once you found it. The "catch-up window" frame outlived the paid campaign, the landing page, the price ladder, and three rounds of creative. It became the way the brand and the audience referred to a thing that, six months earlier, neither party had a name for.
The diagnostic isn't whether the demand exists. It's whether the audience has been given a sentence they can say without flinching.
I think about this a lot now in the context of categories adjacent to the ones I've worked in. There's a version of this problem in adult mental health, in fertility, in elder care, in chronic-disease self-management. The diagnostic isn't whether the demand exists — it almost always does. The diagnostic is whether the audience has been given a sentence they can say without flinching.
What this implies for how I work, and probably what I'm carrying into Imperial: the writing is the strategy. Not the brand book, not the positioning statement, but the actual sentence the customer says to themselves at the moment of the decision. If you don't have it, you don't have a category yet. You have a product looking for one.