Evolving Public Health England's approach to behaviour change: Uncovering social and cultural barriers to presentation for cancer treatment

Emma Munroe-Faure and Lucas Galan

Public Health England, a UK government agency, promoted the benefits of an early cancer diagnosis by using linguistic modelling and semiotic analysis to explore “public” and “personal” discourses of cancer.

Executive summary

Be Clear on Cancer (BCOC) is a program of activity launched by Public Health England (PHE) in 2010, with the aim of improving England's cancer survival rates by raising awareness of the signs and symptoms of cancer, encouraging those with symptoms to see their doctor as soon as possible, and promoting the benefits of early diagnosis.

After 10 years of activity, PHE decided to sense-check its approach and look for areas of optimisation.

PHE commissioned cultural strategy agency Flamingo to unearth barriers to early presentation and find ways of overcoming them with future campaigns and communications. Flamingo...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands