Winning hearts and minds in pensions isn’t the same as winning attention.
You can win attention in a second… with a click or headline. You can win awareness with a campaign. You can even win compliance over with some clever negotiating! But you cannot win long-term behaviour without something far rarer: Belief.
And that’s where it gets tricky for pensions. Because pensions don’t just need to be noticed – they need to be prioritised… consistently, over decades, often when life is expensive and the future feels abstract.
That doesn’t happen because something was attention grabbing and click worthy – it happens because something feels worth your time!
Structure and behaviour
We talk a lot in this industry about engagement strategies. About dashboards, nudges, segmentation and behavioural design. And these things matter.
Auto-enrolment proved structure can change behaviour at scale, but structural success is not emotional investment. Being defaulted in is not the same as believing in it. And it’s belief that sustains behaviour when contributions compete with childcare, mortgages, rising bills and short-term gratification.
If we’re honest, pensions are rarely positioned as something to believe in. They’re framed as sensible. Necessary. Tax-efficient. Prudent… rational, responsible and emotionally flat.
We’ve actually become very good at explaining how pensions work (in a way that is much easier to understand). Less good at articulating why they matter in human terms.
We all need meaning…
Humans don’t attach to mechanisms, they attach to meaning. So, we’re less likely to be inspired by a contribution rate, but we do care about staying independent, not becoming financially fragile and being able to do the things we want in later life.
So what? What I’ saying is that; security is emotional as is autonomy and relief! Yet much of our communication strips pensions of precisely those dimensions. We lead with the wrapper, not the reason. And then we quietly accept minimum viable engagement as success.
What does good look like?
The campaigns that genuinely win hearts and minds (in any sector) do something different. They connect behaviour to identity. A great example is Sport England’s This Girl Can! It didn’t lead with statistics about health, it celebrated women moving in imperfect and real ways… it let them see themselves in the story. That approach wasn’t cosmetic – it worked. Today the campaign is credited with inspiring more than 3 million women to become more active and boosting confidence for eight out of ten women exposed to it!
What makes this compelling… for all industries, isn’t just the scale of the outcome, but how it was achieved. The campaign didn’t sell features; it sold a vision of participation that people could see themselves in. It moved activity from something abstract to something felt, owned and self-defined.
This is how to win hearts and minds… by allowing someone to think – this is me! When behaviour aligns to identity, it stays. When it feels like compliance, it’s fragile!
And pensions, by definition, are decades of commitment. Fragile engagement is not good enough.
Why would you love a pension?
So… here’s the uncomfortable question. If pensions were not mandatory, incentivised or defaulted… Would people choose them?
Not because they understand tax relief, or because they’ve been auto-enrolled, or even because HR reminded them. But because they felt emotionally committed to what a pension represents.
I think the honest answer is ‘probably not’. So the challenge isn’t just sorting dashboards or improving annual statements. It’s so much deeper.
It’s whether we’ve made the future tangible enough, and valuable enough, for people to care about protecting it.
Attention can be engineered.
Compliance can be designed.
But commitment has to be earned.
And if we want pensions to be more than a deduction people tolerate, we may need to stop asking how to make them clearer… and start asking how to make them worth loving.
Karen Quinn, Co-Founder
