Losing your audience

My first boss was a formidable woman called Belinda Benney. She was intelligent, precise, gossipy, controlled, demanding, amusing and strong-willed. She dressed conservatively and fired the first shots in Biddle & Co’s great trouser suit war of 1994. She was also very generous with her opinions, which she would share with no great prompting.

“Alastair”, she would often say, “when people think of the word ‘pensions’, they think ‘old’, they think ‘grey’, they think ‘boring’. But if every time you think the word ‘pensions’ you instead say ‘money’ [she smacked her lips with enthusiasm on the m], suddenly everything seems much more exciting.”

She was, as on so many things, absolutely right. I would add only one qualification. When most people think of the word ‘pensions’, they don’t really think of anything at all beyond a general haze. It’s not a concept they are particularly familiar with.

To be clear, I’m not insulting the general public’s intelligence. There are a whole load of subjects I know nothing about: in many respects my ignorance is bottomless. My sister is a primary school teacher and when she talks of graphemes, blending and partitioning, I have to scramble to catch up. I have two nephews who are plumbers and they can lose me even more quickly.

Perhaps you think that pensions is too important a subject and merits more attention from the general public. I’m not sure that it’s more important than educating small children and if you’ve ever had an emergency leak there is nothing more important than finding your stopcock ASAP (please, make sure you know where your stopcock is).

It may come as a shock to some, but just because someone has paid little attention to pensions doesn’t mean that they’re unintelligent. They just have different things to pay attention to.

Yet when we communicate with members all too often we use all kinds of words that they don’t understand. Buy-out? Drawdown? You have to be very clued into pensions to know what they’re referring to. Annuity is the kind of word that features in Reader’s Digest’s “How To Increase Your Word Power”. I doubt one person in 1,000 knows what decumulation is. Even words like entitlement are more familiar with different meanings to most readers, a word more usually seen in Facebook posts about brass necks.

Far too often, pensions communications are catering for the 2% who are super well-informed about pensions (because they’re the ones who are going to get in touch), leaving the 98% confused. No one intends to do this. Yet we still do because we still set the bar of understanding too high.

There is, however, one group in the pensions industry who are much better at communicating with members: scammers. They talk about something that members are interested in: money. They do so with emotional intelligence. They do so with directness. They do so with persistence.

Scammers are a plague on the pensions industry. The infection will keep spreading for so long as the rest of us aren’t as good at communicating as they are. However, they have something to teach us. And we should learn from them.