Over the past 40 years, early detection and prevention have helped reduce cervical cancer rates in the United States by 50%. However, in the developing world, thousands of women are still dying needlessly.
University of Georgia Coca-Cola Company Chair of Marketing Sundar Bharadwaj has worked with public health officials and marketing researchers in India to develop outreach campaigns that overcome stigma and encourage Indian women to get screened for cervical cancer.
By pairing a low-cost empowering message with peer health educators, the team was able to almost triple the number of women in the study who received cervical cancer screening during a 16,000-person test campaign.
“Understanding the interplay between source and message can unlock tremendous potential to boost health outcomes, empower communities, and ultimately save millions of lives,” Bharadwaj said. “The path to achieving global health equity for cervical cancer, and indeed for many other preventable diseases, lies in culturally attuned information that is strategically delivered”.
Bharadwaj and his coauthors — Indian Institute of Management marketing professors Vedha Ponnappan and Prakash Satyavageeswaran and University of Texas marketing doctoral student Anima Nivsarkar — published the results of the project in the Journal of Marketing. The paper is online now at will in print in early 2026.
In India, fewer than 1.9% of women are screened for cervical cancer each year – compared to nearly 70% in the United States and Australia. Stigma surrounding reproductive health care is a huge hurdle keeping women from getting the care they need. Bharadwaj felt he could use the tools used the same marketing tools used to sell soap and stop littering to help women to take charge of their health.
He and his team relied on the state’s public healthcare workers to deliver video messages to their patients who attended the clinics via mobile phones. The videos were delivered to the healthcare workers through WhatsAPP.
The videos, which were shown during normal doctor’s visits, featured two test messages — one that provided the basic information about the benefits of early detection and cervical cancer screening and one that empowered women to take action to protect their own health. Each message was delivered by a physician or by a peer (a woman from the community of the patients) without medical training.
“What we were offering was the information from infographic in a different form but also presented by different people,” Bharadwaj said. “It’s not just information alone that counts, it’s who presents information matters.”
Each of the test messages outperformed the infographic posters that most clinics and hospitals used to encourage cervical cancer screenings, with twice as many women agreeing to screening after hearing an informative message from a non-medical peer or doctor than those who saw no video. However, the most impactful combination was the non-medically trained peer woman who spoke in a local dialect, addressed stigma against reproductive health care directly and empowered women to care for their own health. Thirty percent of these women — compared to 10 percent in the control group who saw the poster — agreed to be screened.
“When we think about messaging, we think about content and the messenger being fit for the purpose,” Bharadwaj said. “What we found in this study is not limited to India. We just happen to study this in this context of India, because we had an opportunity. There are a lot of public health issues in this country where we could use the same approach”. India could really benefit from this approach as they have a large network of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) — community volunteers who provide informal public health education to their communities