Ireland’s population is aging and living longer, with retirement now lasting a third of our lives. Despite this, 66% of people in Ireland state feeling unprepared for retirement, struggling with anxiety and a lack of purpose when this life-stage arrives.

Standard Life are the retirement experts, guided by their purpose to ‘help our customers move forward in a way that matters and makes sense to them’. Pensions are a complex and low-interest category - to really connect with our audience and get them to consider Standard Life as their financial retirement partner, we had to become a real partner by also helping them to emotionally prepare for it.

While competitors had bigger budgets and rational messages, we led with an empathy-based approach based on empathy to improve how people think about retirement and its possibilities. Our challenge was to prove our commitment to helping people prepare for this stage.

In Ireland, every school and college student has a Career Guidance Counsellor to help them start their career, but when you end your career, you’re on your own. Our idea was to find a retired Career Guidance Counsellor with experience working with students, and hire him to provide a critical service to retirees struggling to emotionally prepare for their next life chapter.

Enter Brian Mooney, a retired Counsellor with over 43 years’ experience. To bring our idea to fruition, Standard Life hired him to become the first ever ‘End of Career Guidance Counsellor’, an entirely new role within both Standard Life and Ireland. Unlike other financial institutions advisors, he didn’t talk about pensions. His goal was to help people ending their career to find purpose in their new stage of life.

In the retirement market Standard Life were the underdogs. To compete against competitors’ higher spend and more attractive value propositions, we needed to think differently. To disrupt sector convention of rational, value-based messaging, we had to appeal to our audience's emotional needs.

We learned that despite lasting a third of our lives, people don’t prepare for retirement the way they do for other big life milestones such as choosing school, college, having a career or family. Instead they’re thrust into uncertainty feeling lost and unhappy, with over 60% feeling unprepared to emotionally navigate this new stage.

Our strategy was to create a solution that would help solve this problem for our audience in a way that financial products couldn’t. A practical demonstration of our purpose (help customers move forward in a way that matters and makes sense to them) that would deliver real social impact and value to people’s lives.

Since Brian Mooney’s appointment as End of Career Guidance Counsellor, we’ve executed the idea across multiple touchpoints on the retirement journey.

1. PR-led launch activity announcing Brian's new role, with appearances, interviews and thought leadership pieces in major local media and press, amplified via job postings on LinkedIn.

2. We promoted Brian’s new position through our hero video, presenting the End of Career Guidance Counsellor himself, via paid and earned media coverage.

3. We conducted counselling sessions with Brian for our staff, Standard Life customers’ staff and through webinars for independent Financial Advisors.

4. Brian carried out 1-to-1 sessions with soon-to-be-retirees and appeared in mainstream media channels (radio, digital and press), aiming to change the wider conversation around retirement preparation, to influence retirees and Irish society in general.

5. Brian’s role remains active today; with the Standard Life brand continuing to support retirees across Ireland.

Disruption paid off. By practically supporting people on an emotional level, we made big societal and commercial gains.

1. We improved people’s perceptions of retirement, fighting retirement anxiety and encouraging better financial planning. After exposure to our idea, 66% of the soon-to-be retirees (55-64 year-olds) now agreed that “retirement doesn't have to be something that just happens; it can be the start of something new” and 58% considered it to be “the opportunity to create my own pace”. An increase of +7pp during 2021.

2. Significant business impact across both final customers and independent financial advisors resulting in a 48% increase in new revenue and 45% increase in new policies for Standard Life in 2021.

3. In his new role, Brian Mooney has become a regular on the Irish media circuit, helping to transform the wider conversation about retirement in Ireland to be a more positive one.