PensionBee CMO Jasper Martens on what a cautious category gets wrong about risk.
When did you last see a pension ad you actually remembered?
For most people, the answer is probably never. Our category has looked and sounded the same for years: smiling couples on beaches, cruise ships and golf courses, all wrapped in reassuring talk of annual management fees.
And when an ad does grab you, it usually manages it through fear. Save more now, or risk going without later. It’s all very safe, very compliant, and almost entirely forgettable.
That’s the trap much of our industry has fallen into. In a category where people already disengage because pensions feel complicated and uninspiring, playing it safe doesn’t reduce the risk, it adds to it.
The biggest danger isn’t saying the wrong thing, it’s saying the same thing as everyone else.
I think this comes from how financial services has become brilliant at explaining products, but remarkably poor at helping people imagine outcomes. We tell savers what a pension is and how it works. We rarely help them picture the life it pays for.
Close that gap and you have a chance of being remembered. Ignore it and no marketing budget will save you.
So the useful question for any marketer in a low-engagement category is not ‘how do we explain this better?’, but ‘what does this actually make possible’.
For PensionBee, that meant moving the focus off the pension and onto the person. Maybe retirement means touring the country in a campervan. Maybe it’s learning to paint, growing vegetables or simply having more time for the people you love. Either way, the pension is not the story.
It is what lets the story happen. Finding that tone meant looking outside our own category.
Study only your competitors and you end up reproducing them.
Our most useful reference points came from cinema and even Renaissance paintings – both art forms that reward a second glance – rather than from other pension ads.
That’s how we landed on something warm and slightly heightened that looked unlike anything else on the shelf.
But originality on its own is not the goal. Push the world too far and people will admire it without recognising themselves in it.
Your design agency wins the award, but you might lose the customer!
The tricky bit is not being different. It is being different while keeping the emotion familiar enough that someone sees their own life in it.
One thing I’ve learned through this process is that every growing company feels the pull towards ever-increasing caution. More approval layers, more people to convince, more reasons not to take the creative risk.
What holds that pull at bay is confidence in your own product.
When you know it genuinely solves a real problem for the people who use it, you can afford to be bold everywhere else.
Memorability, just like a pension, is a means, not an end. The lesson isn’t that every brand should suddenly start making cinematic advertising in an attempt to be memorable. But marketers should question whether they’re making work that people will actually notice.
Because if your audience forgets you the moment they scroll past, it doesn’t matter how accurate your message was or how carefully it was approved.
Safe doesn’t stand out.