Cutting through stereotypes to help older people
The world’s largest building society wanted to get a better understanding of the needs and motivations of people in later life. We helped develop 100 new ideas and cut through generational barriers.
Before you read on, spend a few moments imagining the life of a 60-something retiree. Let’s call him Paul. He’s a former policeman. What does he do all day? What’s new in his life?
Got a picture in your head? We’ll come back to Paul in a moment.
It’s easy to make lazy assumptions about ageing. We think about the experiences of our parents and grandparents, what retirement was like for them, how they spent their time and navigated with later life. This is risky both personally and as a society.
We met Paul during a series of in-depth research interviews for Nationwide.
Nationwide is the largest building society in the world, with 15 million members. They want to help their members navigate ‘later life’. This isn’t about financial products alone, but how they might better meet the needs of an ageing population. So they needed to get a very deep sense of what later life meant for people.
How should Nationwide redesign what they do today to help older members? What might later life look like in the near-term and how can Nationwide be there for their members as their needs evolve? What might be the implications of the ‘100-year life’ for Nationwide? We spent over two hours each with 26 people between the ages of 56 and 85. They ranged from being five years away from retirement to being 25 years in. We met them in their own homes and listened to them talk about their lives, their aspirations, their ambitions, and their concerns. Whenever we spend time with customers, we come away surprised. Real life confounds stereotypes and assumptions, and that’s particularly true when we look at ageing.
Paul’s story was a great example. When you imagined the life of a “60-something retiree”, did it involve Paul raising a toddler (his son, from a second marriage) while caring for his 90-year-old mum? And did you guess what he does now, working as a start-up advisor helping a high-tech home security company?
Armed with empathetic insights into customers’ lives, we went back to Nationwide and together identified nine thematic ‘platforms’ for innovation. These were used to drive workshops that generated over 100 ideas for later life products and services.
The ideas were filtered down into six broad concepts. We took them back out into the real world through co-creation, working with real customers to develop, then validate the ideas.
In recent years Fluxx has worked with a number of organisations that shape propositions and services for the 55-plus.
The crux of our approach involves broadening an organisation’s perspective on both who the ‘aged’ is, and what ‘ageing’ means for not just their customer base but society as a whole.
This involves breaking stereotypes, challenging demographic profiles and using intimate consumer engagement to go from the apparent question, which might be ’How can we cater to an older customer base?’ to the real question: ‘What do our older customers want from life and how can we help them achieve those goals?’
Richard Edgley is a Managing Consultant at Fluxx. To find out more about our work, check out Fluxx Studio Notes on Medium, download our latest book, or sign up to our Newsletter.
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