If you build it, will they come?

Marketing is a bad word according to some in government. To them, it is the epitome of frivolous spending when public agencies use tax dollars on branding and advertising. Your government, they say, shouldn’t spend your hard earned tax money to try to sell you things. 

Some times they’re right. There are plenty of examples of government misspending on marketing. I once watched an agency spend $20 million in two years on marketing for a new program, only to have the whole thing come crashing down in spectacular fashion due to IT failures. I then had the unfortunate task of helping rebuild the program from the bottom up, including its branding and communications, on a shoe-string budget. In that case, the marketing definitely worked. Everybody knew about the program but for all the wrong reasons.

The highest priority, of course, should be making sure the program actually works. I’d also argue that it’s pretty hard to design systems and services, especially innovative ones like state-sponsored retirement programs, that truly best serve people’s needs if you don’t make time and resources available to research your target audiences to better understand who they are, what they need, and how to reach them. 

Good marketing does just that: it ensures people can easily find and access the services they need, maximizing the efficiency of programs and the positive impact they have on the folks they serve. If you build it, people might come, but more likely, without marketing, they’ll have no idea it exists. And even if they know it exists, they might not understand it or think it isn’t for them. 

When starting up a program designed to improve people’s retirement security, it is critical to research the populations the program is designed to serve and their demographics, especially if the target audiences are traditionally underserved. It’s equally important to then engage with community leaders, organizations, and people with lived experience to learn the most effective ways to reach and engage them and to ensure communications are accessible and culturally relevant.

Folks need to see themselves in the program.

If they see it as their program, they’ll be far more likely to join and maximize its benefits. They should be able to relate to the images used in materials and on the website. They should be able to engage with the program in their own languages, in plain spoken words. And they are far more likely to be open to it if they hear about it through sources, channels, and people they trust.

They should even see themselves in the brand name itself. The original name of Oregon’s program was the “Oregon Retirement Savings Program,” which was quite the mouthful. Since governments love acronyms, that was usually shortened to “ORSP”. It’s hard to see yourself in something called the “ORSP.”

Marketing helped us rebrand the program as OregonSaves, a much simpler name that made it much easier to have conversations with folks about what it was and how it could help them improve their lives.

Should we market great programs? Yes, we should. We’re doing our intended users a disservice if we leave them unaware and uninvolved. Even if we’re the government.

Columnist and Senior Associate Joel Metlen is based in Oregon. Joel is a pioneer of the state facilitated retirement savings space, woven into a career of public service and innovation. At OregonSaves, Joel’s responsibilities ranged from marketing and employer engagement to operations and data analysis. You’ll see his insights from that experience, and more, here in his columns.

This piece was featured in the August 12, 2021 edition of Retirement Security Matters. For more fresh thinking on retirement savings innovation, check out the newsletter here.