Together with one of my former colleagues, Michiel Bloemendaal, I participated in Battle of Concepts. We decided to work on the challenge for Nationale Nederlanden. The challenge they had was: ‘How can we make the online pension portal more inspiring and relevant for our clients?’
Together we spent about a week trying to come up with solutions. The interesting thing was that we both don’t know much about pensions itself, so we had to start learning about the basics of pensions and finding creative solutions in a short amount of time. We used our own knowledge of trends, innovation, marketing and target group research. The first thing we did was making sure we had a good survey which concluded all the information we wanted to know about different generations and how they experience building up a pension. The outcome of this survey, combined with trends in society, was the starting point of our brainstorm sessions.
We ended up submitting two concepts that would make the online portal more inspiring and relevant. We realized that people only start to care about their pension when they turn about forty years old. Before that, it seems to far away and irrelevant.
The first concept ‘Levelen’ makes building up a pension look like a game. One of the problems clients face is that they have to change their way of living after they become pensioners. This comes a shock very often, as they thought they had built up enough pension. Levelen makes sure that the clients will have insight in what they will need after they become pensioners, according to the lifestyle they currently have. There are four levels: Basics, Big unexpected expenses, Luxury and Dreams. They can see the total percentage that they have saved to complete keeping up with their lifestyle in the future. Finish Level 1? Only then you can move on to level 2. This way, clients can work towards the final level: Dreams. This level consist of a self-made bucket list. But you can’t reach your dreams if you don’t think about other important costs. The way the ‘game’ is set up, makes it inspiring and relevant in an early stage.
The second concept called Pensioen in Perspectief (Pension in Perspective), was mainly focused on the fact that even though clients can see the amount of money they’ve built up, they don’t know if it is good or not, as they don’t have anything to compare it with. With Pensioen in Perspectief we changed that. The client is able to compare their own pension with others. To make it as relevant as possible, they would have the opportunity to use filters. That way, the client can compare himself with for example others in their age group, branche, location and living situation. This idea is partly based on Social Proof, a way to change behaviour of people. If you see that others are doing better, it inspires you to do as well as them.
At this point we are still waiting for the outcome of the challenge, and if we’ve won. We sure hope so, but it was a great experience either way!