Transform Tomorrow by Stig Nybo

Author:Stig Nybo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-12-21T05:00:00+00:00

The Power of Beliefs

Historically, the financial services industry has focused largely on the belief side of the continuum, with early efforts involved at convincing individuals to save. When our focus on changing beliefs didn't arrive at the desired outcome, the pendulum swung too far in the other direction, to context. The vast majority of conversations going on in our industry right now are concerned with context: from our focus on auto-enrollment to target date investment solutions.

If we are to take a leaf out of the books of these successful public awareness campaigns, we need to design a national retirement readiness initiative that doesn't just rely on context, but also taps into the power of our beliefs at a societal as well as an individual level. This is something we don't think we have tackled well in the past and seem to be overlooking currently.

As we pointed out in the Introduction, we believe the social climate is ripe to galvanize the country around this issue. But we need a campaign with a vision—one that is specific about the behavior change we need in order for more Americans to be financially secure when they are no longer working. We need to be able to tell people what they need to do in simple, unambiguous terms. And that requires a clear and compelling message and perhaps an empathetic messenger, in the vein of Rosie, Smokey Bear, and the Crying Indian. Plus, we need to leverage the media so that the message reaches a wide audience frequently enough to be memorable.

Not least, we need to believe that people do have the capacity to change, given the support of contextual factors that remind them continually that they are forming new habits—which takes time and is not an overnight quick fix.

These themes, then—of context, beliefs, and resolve, and ways to tell a more compelling story rather than relying on left-brained focused statistics and factual information—are the ones we will be exploring in more depth in the following three chapters, as they relate to the issue of retirement. From a context-heavy approach we are envisioning a much more innovative, national public-will campaign that takes all of these components into account, but perhaps more than anything lays greater stress on the beliefs and emotions that all successful marketing campaigns tap into, but which our industry and government has largely ignored when it comes to talking about retirement.

First, however, let's take a look at the importance of context—the topic of the next chapter.

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