From mundane to meaningful: Winning campaigns through human connection

Financial marketing is an ever-evolving landscape, and the strategies that worked as recently as 10 years ago are no longer as impactful. The strategies of today, including emotional resonance, strategic differentiation and data-driven insights, are paramount for sustained success.

In this episode of the Marketer’s Alchemy podcast, Jasper Martens, CMO of PensionBee, shares his innovative approach to marketing a product often perceived as mundane—retirement planning—and turning it into something emotionally resonant and compelling. 

About the guest: Jasper Martens, CMO at PensionBee

Jasper Martens, Chief Marketing Officer at PensionBee, has dedicated his career to the art and science of marketing, combining creativity with data-driven strategy. With a formal education in marketing and a passion for effective communication cultivated from an early age, Jasper’s journey began with digital marketing, search engine optimization and social media. Transitioning into financial marketing, he honed his skills at a high-growth business insurance company in London, where he rose from SEO executive to head of marketing, managing campaigns that reached over 300,000 customers.

Since joining PensionBee as its second employee nearly a decade ago, Jasper has been instrumental in scaling the company from its startup phase to a leader in the UK retirement space. Now based in New York, he is spearheading PensionBee’s expansion into the U.S. market, bringing his expertise in making complex financial products accessible and emotionally resonant.

What’s inside this episode

Jasper highlights the importance of tailoring customer data to create personalized experiences. At PensionBee, this is achieved through their "beehive" framework, which integrates marketing channel data, transactional data, and behavioral data. This approach allows the team to prioritize understanding customer actions over mere demographics, ensuring a more targeted and effective strategy.

Jasper emphasizes the power of emotional resonance in marketing. The Believe in the Bee campaign exemplifies this by focusing entirely on how the product makes customers feel, shifting away from product features to focus more on emotional messaging. Jasper’s "secret sauce" lies in transforming a traditionally mundane product like retirement planning into something engaging and relatable—an approach that continues to shape PensionBee's future offerings.

Other topics explored in this episode include:

• Collaboration and metrics-driven results: The importance of close collaboration with the CFO, highlighting the need to demonstrate tangible value through data and metrics
• Emotion-led marketing: The critical role of emotion in financial marketing; through creative testing on digital and analog channels, PensionBee identified the emotional impact that resonated best with their audience. Over time, the company shifted its focus from product-centric advertising to emotion-driven messaging, emphasizing the peace of mind their service provided. Recent campaigns featured no product visuals, concentrating solely on the emotional benefits to establish a stronger direct-to-consumer connection.
• Addressing common consumer problems: PensionBee’s marketing initially tackled the widespread issue of retirement pot confusion among consumers. Campaigns used a simple “problem-solution” approach, featuring visuals like a phone app with clear, upward-trending graphs. While effective initially, Jasper notes that such tactics risked blending in with competitors, necessitating differentiation through branding and messaging.
• Avoiding channel saturation: There are risks of over-reliance on specific marketing channels, which can lead to diminishing returns and rising acquisition costs. Jasper advocates for a diversified approach, constantly reassessing strategies to maintain cost-efficiency and impact.
• Redefining value through emotion: A turning point for PensionBee was recognizing that their true offering extended beyond financial solutions—it provided customers with peace of mind. This realization led to experimental campaigns, such as sponsoring the UK Weather Channel in specific regions, and eventually evolved into broader campaigns emphasizing emotional benefits over product features.

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