Pensions in uncertain times
Last month, The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association (previously the National Association of Pensions Funds) announced their new purpose: to help everyone achieve a better retirement income.
Pensions. Before this work, nothing about that word felt relevant to me — I hadn't put any thought into them and assumed it was for older people; the word itself even sounds old. Then two big catalysts changed my view (and it certainly wasn’t my parents telling me I should get one).
First our office set up auto enrolment ahead of the Government’s desire to get everyone onto a pension by 2018. Then I ended up on a pitch team for an organisation in the pensions sector. I had to learn fast— suddenly that word I had no interest in was thrust into the forefront of my mind. I asked myself, what’s the deal with pensions?
Once I had a better understanding of the ‘p’ word, why it was so important to my life, the economy and potentially the lives of others close to me, I was amazed by how interesting the pensions world became.
Working with the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association has felt critical. After 90 years as an association, they sit at the heart of the auto enrolment shake up and have multiple audiences looking to them for guidance: their members, regulators, the government and millions of SMEs needing to arrange pension schemes for their employees. Now more than ever, they needed ways to demonstrate how they can help.
The Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association are an interesting bunch — you probably hadn’t heard of them before now, and beyond the need to be more widely known, they are also an organisation made of members that all have a different position on pensions. They needed a brand that would help them cut through the noise and stand above all of the groups and people clamouring for share of voice.
It was a complex challenge: the brand had to help galvanise their voice, while still be balanced and work with everyone to help savers. Though they are understood as the authority on pensions in the industry already, they also needed to look to the future with optimism as more people are now looking to their retirement. The new name includes ‘Lifetime Savings’; it’s a people-focused phrase that reflects how people talk about their money later in life.
Guided by this strategy and an assessment of the industry we took advantage of a bold colour palette, very different from other organisations in the industry to help them have a new active presence in a very blue world.
The new icon, which works with the content, is a lens that moves and changes size to visually guide audiences through the association’s wealth of information to the most useful content.
The wordmark and typography are clean and functional, alluding to editorial aesthetics so that their many audiences quickly recognise the quality and depth of information available to them.
Being thrown into the thick of such a topical, significant and rapidly changing world has been really rewarding personally (as well as hopefully rewarding in my ‘later life’). Beyond that Joanne Segars, Chief Executive of the Association summarized it best at their annual conference: “For nearly everyone, it takes time, often a lifetime, to build up savings for retirement. And for our members, old and new, from the biggest defined benefit schemes to the smallest and newest automatically enrolled employers, we want to make that process as straightforward, efficient and clear as we can.”
Ben Gibbs is a Senior Designer at Wolff Olins London.