King's College London

New research from King’s Business School shows that an approach to awareness campaigns that favours long-term engagement and sidesteps cultural taboos and online content restrictions, is successful in both sharing life-saving knowledge and enhancing partner brands’ credibility with its target audience.

The ‘Know Your Lemons’ campaign uses lemons as a visual metaphor for breasts, allowing the content to be shared freely across digital platforms and in public places and minimising the need for text-heavy descriptions of the symptoms that may be inaccessible for some audiences. The campaigns have reached 2 billion people across 40 languages, including communities that have historically faced barriers to breast health education.

Dr Ilia Protopapa, Senior Lecturer in Marketing at King’s Business School has worked with the Know Your Lemons foundation for four years in her teaching and conducted research on the effectiveness of their work. Her study with Dr Corrine Ellsworth Beaumont, CEO & Founder of Know Your Lemons engaged with 11,871 participants that had seen the Know Your Lemons campaigns, and showed that:

• 77.5% of consumers report better symptom recognition,

• 92.8% said they felt more informed about diagnosis and testing options and

• 68.2% of users feel confident discussing breast health with doctors, a critical step to early diagnosis and treatment.

A follow-up study with over 1,000 consumers that had been exposed to the campaign’s longer-term brand partnerships, each lasting around a year, showed the impact that more extended partnerships have in establishing brand credibility and changing behaviour. 90% of consumers that had seen partnership material perceived the brand's commitment to the cause as strong and authentic and 93–94% of consumers reported being more open to learning about breast health.

World Breast Alliance Conference

Dr Protopapa is hosting The World Breast Alliance Conference on 2 May to share her research findings and provide a space for marketers, CSR specialists and health campaigners to explore approaches to effective awareness campaigns and share best-practice and tools for developing and assessing effective brand partnerships.

Speakers at the conference include; Dr Corrine Ellsworth Beaumont, CEO & Founder, Know Your Lemons, Emma Betts, National Charities Partnership Manager, Asda. Ms Lynsey White, a young breast cancer survivor who spotted her symptoms thanks to a Know Your Lemons campaign and Dr Liz O’Riordan, award winning speaker and author, former breast cancer surgeon and breast cancer survivor.