The world of pensions and retirement marketing is often defined by caution, compliance and conservative imagery: white linen-clad old people, serene beaches and gentle assurances of a secure future.
For Alice Leighton, who joined one of the UK’s largest financial brands – The People’s Pension, offered by People’s Partnership – as Marketing Director in 2024, the challenge was to shatter that stereotype and bring genuine visibility.
“What attracted me to this role is that it is one of the biggest brands in terms of customers,” she explains. “There are seven million people in the UK that have a pension with us. And it’s very much an unknown brand, which in itself is quite an interesting challenge for a marketeer: How can you get a fairly large brand in terms of customer audience on the map and get it to become a household name?”
The scale of the company is undeniable: People’s Pension manages over £35bn in assets and provides workplace pensions to over 100,000 employers, meaning roughly one in five eligible UK workers are saving for retirement through the scheme. Yet, the corporate brand, People’s Partnership, understood that size alone did not guarantee relevance. For years, the brand had maintained a quiet presence, building trust through reliability and a genuinely different structural purpose.
The white space of purpose
Leighton’s team quickly moved to establish a new brand narrative, starting with a fundamental truth that sets them apart from the bulk of the financial sector. People’s Partnership operates on a clear, defining principle: Profit for people.
“Ultimately we are a bit different to most of our competitors,” Leighton says. “We don’t have shareholders, and because of that, we’re able to really push forward and reinvest all the profits that we make into doing the right thing by our customers.”
This unique, member-centric structure provided the bedrock for the new positioning. The initial phase involved a sharp, six-to-eight-week process focused on recreating the brand narrative, supported by extensive primary and secondary research. The findings confirmed a deep fatigue among consumers regarding the standard, jargon-heavy pension conversation.
“It all centred around the fact that we were willing to give things back and consumers just don’t want people to talk at them about pensions in the same usual way,” she says. “I think people are looking desperately for something different and approachable and accessible. Just because pensions are a serious financial product doesn’t mean that you can’t have some fun…make it feel like a part of everyday conversation.”
The mission became clear: to introduce the brand to the public and make a serious subject unexpectedly engaging.
The challenger mentality
Recognising the need for a non-traditional approach, People’s Partnership sought a creative partner that specialised in disrupting saturated markets. They landed on Bountiful Cow, part of the Seven Stars group, known for its focus on challenger brands.
“They work under a principle called relative advantage, which is basically looking for windows and opportunities to do something different in a space where other people are all doing the same thing—so going past a sea of sameness, if you like,” Leighton explains.
The resulting campaign, which the in-house team refers to as the “pension drop,” aimed straight for attention by positioning the brand in unexpected places and using unconventional voices. The initial focus was a reach phase, designed to shout about who they are nationwide. The campaign used a multi-channel attack:
- Above-the-line advertising including significant investment in out of home (OOH) placements across the country.
- Radio advertising and social media support.
- A key creative partnership with Iain Stirling, instantly recognisable as “the voice of Love Island.”
The Stirling collaboration was a masterstroke of juxtaposition, injecting immediate modernity and levity into the conversation, according to Leighton. Using this type of unexpected, well-known voice was intentional: “The reason for that is to try and make it much more accessible and a bit of fun around who we are and why we’re different.”
The goal was to replicate the success of a sprinkling of other notable campaigns in the sector that had achieved cut-through simply by being unexpected—by bringing a serious topic into everyday conversation in a way people wouldn’t anticipate.
A focus on real people, real stories
Beyond the immediate media blitz, the campaign’s visual identity was built on another core principle derived from the brand’s name: People’s Pension must be represented by real people. The marketing team deliberately shunned traditional financial services imagery.
“We are called People’s, so really we use our own people in our advertising most of the time,” Leighton says. “We focus on who we are and what we’re about as opposed to stock shots and models, which most of the category don’t use.”
Crucially, the brand is making a concerted effort to engage the demographic with the most to gain from early engagement: Gen Z and Millennials. This audience requires entirely new engagement strategies, moving beyond traditional platforms, particularly given a widespread sense of “fear fatigue”.
Research commissioned by People’s Partnership found that 74% of Gen Zs and Millennials are negatively affected by constant doom-and-gloom media stories, leading to 57% of young adults feeling less in control of their own future. Financial worries feature highly, with 30% listing the cost of living and personal finances as an issue affecting them most.
This psychological landscape directly informs the group’s strategy. The campaign, which has the social media hashtag #PensionDrop, aims to make pensions feel less daunting by “dropping helpful pension know-how where you wouldn’t usually find it,” often involving social media influencers and lifestyle gurus like Manifesting Queen Roxie Nafousi.
Leighton notes: “We’re trying to bring the pension conversation to places where you least expect it to pop up. We are working with influencers and we’re going to do some event-based activations to really bring the pension conversation onto the map.”
The group’s research shows that this demographic finds control not through grand changes, but through micro-behaviours. Some 70% said small, everyday wins make them feel more in control. This recognition of small wins is critical to the campaign’s philosophy.
In a release to accompany the research, Kirsty Ross, proposition director at People’s Pension, noted: “In a world that clearly feels unnerving and chaotic for many, it’s fascinating to see that it’s not the big gestures but the small day to day wins that can restore that sense of control.”
Ross noted that workplace pension providers should learn from this.
“We need to reassure young people that, for all the negative noise on the economy, their financial future is in their control – and that the best way to achieve is exactly what many are doing right now. Take tiny steps as early as possible,” she said.
“The way that we’re going to do it is very much about telling real life stories… and really try and make it feel like it’s about the everyday person on the street, as opposed to just accessible to those people with lots of wealth.”
It is worth noting, too, that the communications strategy is layered, extending beyond the retail member to include the crucial institutional audiences—employers and financial advisors—with tailored, but equally forthright, messaging about the non-shareholder, purpose-driven nature of the organisation.
A campaign of this magnitude – backed by a strategic commitment of £35-40m over five years – cannot succeed solely on external marketing spend. It requires total buy-in from the organisation’s staff, a group numbering over a thousand people.
“You don’t build a brand purely from the marketing team, you build it from within the whole organisation,” Leighton emphasises. To ensure this, the process began inside the company’s walls.
“We got our colleagues to help us build the brand positioning in the first place, so they were part of that journey and part of the creation of the narrative,” she explains. “We launched it internally first because ultimately your people are your brand and they will be the brand experience that many of your customers interact with on a day-to-day basis.”
This internal alignment means the new brand narrative now informs everything from call centre scripts and social media posts to new business pitches.
Early returns and a new vision
At the time of this interview at Pensions UK’s Annual Conference in Manchester, the campaign was only a few weeks into its initial reach phase, yet the early results suggest the disruptive approach is working. The primary metric for immediate cut-through is visibility, and the figures are compelling.
“The search is up 60%,” Leighton proudly states. “We’ve been up 60% since the week we started the campaign, and that’s a really good first indicator that people are starting to notice who we are and where we’re from.”
Beyond the raw data, the campaign is shifting the cultural perception of the brand. The use of Iain Stirling, the ubiquitous billboards up and down the UK and the general buzz are generating conversations that simply didn’t exist before.
“I’m proud that we’ve stood out,” she says. “I think it just shows that if you do things slightly differently you can gain the attention and capture the attention of people.”
For the People’s Partnership team, the long journey of brand building has just begun. But the core motivation remains the same: to dismantle the antiquated image of retirement saving.
“I’m determined to make pensions more accessible and interesting,” Leighton concludes. “We’re going to do things differently.”