Legal & General wants to retire retirement cliches. So much so, its ad campaign at the start of the year took the phrase “smashing stereotypes” literally, by depicting objects such as a carriage clock, slippers and a rocking chair bursting into coloured powder.
So why the shift in direction and how has this informed its broader business approach?
Legal & General Retail Retirement (LGRR)’s changing portrayal of retirement in its communications began after spending around half a million pounds in consumer research, asking how people feel about this life change and what help they require.
One of the key findings was that people want clearer information around their financial options without jargon and technical terms, and more representative images of what retirement might look like for them.
Meg Dickens, the marketing director of LGRR, says: “I think as an industry we have tended to use very stereotypical images about what retirement looks like. But we have to recognise that retirement is not the same for everyone. People don’t have one job for life and get a golden carriage clock at the end of their employment. That's not real life anymore. Our perceptions of retirees are completely out of date.”
Jason Foo, the chief executive of BBD Perfect Storm, which created the “Retiring that” ad campaign, agrees: “The essential theme of our pitch was 'rage against the beige'. There is this morass of terrible and terribly patronising communication to this audience. It is either people in beige linen and silver hair walking on beaches or bungee jumping grannies. Stereotypes are lazy, harmful and ineffective and we wanted to smash them.”
The state of the problem is shown by the ubiquity of Barbara, a “fantastic” model who LGRR has used successfully in previous campaigns, but who has also been used so regularly by competitors that she’s becoming the de facto face of retirement in ads.
“There’s a real shortage of models who you can actually use for photo shoots. This leads to brands using the same images over and over again,” says Dickens. “We need to encourage more people to be models for the industry. Then we might get a really good depiction of what retirement does look like for real people,” she adds.
Indeed, LGRR spoke with Getty Images to commission a broader range of images that represents the diversity of retirement and reflects people’s real experiences. For example, someone who has retired in their 50s will probably be leading a very different life, and have a different attitude to financial risk, to those in their 80s.
LGRR has also changed the way it speaks to customers through its owned channels such as customer scripts and web content. It now uses more colloquial English rather than terminology, because people either don’t understand or don’t engage with it.
It has also set up a free course on retirement with the Open University that explains key questions such as, “what is an annuity?” or, “what does taking risks with your pension mean?”
“This isn’t just a marketing campaign, it’s a new philosophy to help people make better decisions and be more engaged with them,” says Dickens.
Adland’s problem with age
Dickens, who was a judge for 北京赛车pk10’s “40 Over 40” awards, also believes adland needs to rethink the way it approaches age internally. She previously worked at an agency, but moved client side 10 years ago after struggling to do the long days that are expected while also juggling a family. She believes this long hours culture is one of the reasons why there aren’t more older people and senior women in advertising.
“As a service industry there is an expectation that you’re always going to be there to serve a client need - that's really difficult when you've got a family. I consciously made the decision to leave the advertising industry, because I couldn't tell my daughter any more why I wasn't coming home,” she says.
Now on the other side, she believes this devaluing of experience and the failure to keep older agency staff is hampering the industry’s effectiveness: “As a client, when you're dealing with really difficult, challenging problems, you want to speak to people in an agency who have a certain level of experience and depth of understanding about a market. If you don't have that, it can be quite challenging.”
“I want someone who is thinking about the challenges we have in a proactive way and who is able to have a really good debate. I want someone who can say ‘I don’t agree with that’, or ‘have you thought about doing it this way?’”
She adds: “I would also like to see more people that have got different life experiences they can bring into a situation, and give a different insight and different perspective.”