Meeting affluent savers at home before targeting them

The question

A financial services company had picked out mass-affluent savers in its data as a group to reach, and wanted to know them well before deciding what to say to them.

Its data could show what these savers held. The team wanted to understand how they thought and felt about investing, retirement and advice, and how partners and family figured in their plans, with its own questions on workplace retirement plans and market ups and downs covered along the way.

Our approach

Ask people about money and you hear their finances as they’d like them to be, so we asked to see the paperwork.

At home, often with a spouse or partner beside them, savers went through their statements with us, set against what they had shared online about their lives and plans, while quick face-to-face interviews widened the range of savers we heard from.

Family groups brought several generations into the same conversation, since retirement decisions are rarely made alone.

What the team came away with

The work came back as a set of stand-alone cards, each tagged so colleagues could pick up a theme without reading the rest of the set.

A film of savers talking about money, in their own words and often in their own homes, let people across the company see and hear them for themselves, well beyond the research team.

With what savers own set beside what they say, the marketing and research teams could plan targeting and messages from a fuller picture of the people they wanted to reach, at home and among their families.