Objective

Long-term care affordability is the policy question the UK keeps declining to answer, and it is one where the industry and the public hold almost incompatible assumptions about who is responsible.

CMS wanted to influence that debate and, at the same time, give itself something concrete to take to industry about how firms support customers across a whole financial life rather than at the point of sale. One piece of work, two audiences, and they needed different things from it.

Creative response

A flagship thought-leadership programme: research design, the report itself, the client case studies inside it, and the event and video content cut from it. The published material came through the design, digital and creative function.

• A nationally representative survey of 2,000 UK adults, with a distinct question set for each of three groups: current retirees, those aged 38 and over who have not retired, and Millennials and Generation Z aged 18 to 37
• Twelve in-depth interviews with financial services senior leaders, used as case study material running through the report
• Client case studies built to work inside the report and to stand alone once lifted out of it
• Video content with event participants, produced for distribution across social channels after the events

Segmenting the public sample three ways rather than surveying “UK adults” is what makes this report arguable rather than merely publishable. Long-term care is not one debate: a retiree is describing a present cost, someone in their forties is describing a fear, and a twenty-five-year-old is describing something that will be somebody else's problem first. Averaged together those three produce a number that describes nobody.

Surveying the industry alongside the public is the second half of the design. The interesting finding in any research like this is not what either group thinks; it is the size of the gap between them, and you can only report a gap if you measured both sides of it.

• A nationally representative survey of 2,000 UK adults, with a distinct question set for each of three groups: current retirees, those aged 38 and over who have not retired, and Millennials and Generation Z aged 18 to 37
• An online survey of 200 senior and middle managers working inside UK financial services, the industry answering the same question as the public
• Twelve in-depth interviews with financial services senior leaders, used as case study material running through the report
• Client case studies built to work inside the report and to stand alone once lifted out of it
• Video content with event participants, produced for distribution across social channels after the events

Results

• A flagship report used as the platform for two industry events, in London and in Edinburgh
• A panel discussion alongside Legal & General, Scottish Widows and Age UK, the pensions industry and the ageing charity sector in the same room, which is the audience the question actually needs
• Case studies and video content reused beyond the report, across social channels and independently of the publication that produced them