Increasing engagement with retirement through personalised communication?

People are not doing enough to prepare for their retirement. A particular challenge for various stakeholders (governments, retirement providers, employers) is how to increase engagement with retirement? One solution is to rely on personalised communication. Personalisation implies tailoring communication to accommodate individual users. The idea is that personalising retirement communication ought to appeal to individuals more directly and increase engagement. Personalisation can be applied in various forms. On a very basic level, one can personalise by, for example, addressing people by name. For this investigation, however, we focus on a more advanced form where we personalise based on people’s personality characteristics. For example, personalising communication for optimists, as opposed to pessimists by framing textual or visual prompts so that it appeals to optimists. We report the results of five studies. While we find encouraging evidence that people prefer personalized (as opposed to non-personalised) content about retirement, we did not observe changes in retirement engagement. We surmise that bridging the lack of engagement in the retirement domain may require more direct and concrete interventions. Furthermore, we cast doubt on whether personalisation is the right tool to use to correct entrenched behaviours such as retirement planning avoidance.