Context
When we started, the HPV vaccine was a thing most Indian women had heard about, vaguely, in the context of someone else's daughter. It wasn't on any list of things adults bought for themselves. The category, in our market, did not really exist yet — there were a few hospital systems offering it, almost no consumer awareness, and a price point that asked for trust the brand hadn't yet been given the chance to earn.
The question I was holding
Most of the public-health work on HPV in India had been pitched at the parents of adolescent girls. We were a women's health platform with an audience that was overwhelmingly adult women in their twenties and thirties — the people who'd missed the school-age window. The question wasn't how to sell a vaccine. The question was whether a category with this much silence around it could be opened by a brand, what shape that opening would take, and whether the same audience that had trusted us with reproductive and sexual health would let us into a third category they hadn't asked for.
What I did
We treated it as a launch in three parts: the language, the funnel, and the trust scaffolding. The language work mattered most. We borrowed nothing from the global pharma vocabulary — no "protect yourself," no statistics-first creative — and instead led with the small detail that the catch-up window for adult women in India was wider than most people thought. The funnel was deliberately narrow at the top: paid social to a single landing page, organic search optimised against the long tail of catch-up-window questions, and a tele-consult that did the work of converting curiosity into a clinic visit.
What worked and what didn't
The catch-up framing worked. It did the thing the standard framing couldn't, which was give a 28-year-old reading the page a permission structure to act now instead of feel guilty about not having acted at 14. The tele-consult conversion was higher than we modelled because the gap between curiosity and decision was filled by a clinician, not a marketer. What didn't work, at first, was the price ladder — we'd assumed a single-dose offering would feel like a low-commitment entry, but the audience read it as half-priced, not half-protected. We rewrote the price page once we saw the bounce shape.
Outcomes
Over the launch period the programme drove 5,000+ paid vaccinations, in a category whose previous twelve-month total across our cohort was effectively zero. The cost-per-vaccination came in below our internal target, and the long tail held — roughly a third of the volume came in after the paid window had closed, through search and word-of-mouth.
What I took from it
The thing I keep coming back to from this one is that demand in a zero-awareness category isn't created by volume; it's created by giving the audience a sentence they can say to themselves about why this is for them. Most of the year's work was finding that sentence. Once we had it, the funnel was almost mechanical.