Knowing how to speak to affluent savers about retirement
Ask people about money and you hear their finances as they’d like them to be. A financial services company wanted an emotionally true view of affluent savers, so we went through their plans with them at home and brought their families into the conversation.
- Client
- Financial services company
- Industry
- Financial services
- Market
- North America
- Kind of work
- Consumer understanding
- Our role
- Ethnographic research with mass-affluent savers on investing, retirement and advice
The question
The company wanted to understand people with good incomes and money to invest, as they really are.
It wanted to see what savers own and understand, as well as hear what they say. That would let it target them more precisely and know what to say to them about investing and retirement.
Our approach
We started online, where savers recorded video answers about their lives, their money and their plans.
Then we went to their homes, often with a spouse or partner there, and went through their retirement plan statements and portfolios together. Seeing the paperwork meant we could talk about what people owned, as well as what they said.
Family groups brought several generations of one family into a single conversation about money and retirement, and snapshot interviews widened the view.
We built the company’s own questions, on workplace retirement plans, market volatility and financial advice, into the conversation, and the home visits were professionally filmed.
What the team came away with
We brought the evidence together as a set of stand-alone cards, so the material could travel well beyond the research team.
Alongside them came a film of savers talking about money in their own words, made for the company’s targeting and communication work with these savers.
Who we heard from
Mass-affluent savers, online and at home, with snapshot interviews and multi-generational family groups
Related work
View consumer understanding case studies- What we do
- Strategic research
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