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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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| Selling retirement in financial planning advertisements | | Author(s) | David J Ekerdt, Evelyn Clark |
| Journal title | Journal of Aging Studies, vol 15, no 1, March 2001 |
| Pages | pp 55-68 |
| Keywords | Preparation [retirement] ; Financial services [older people] ; Advertising ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | The nature of, and course toward, retirement are perennial issues that the financial services industry bids to define. The authors used a sample of printed advertisements for retirement financial planning from 1997 and 1998 to examine how advertisers create structures of meaning for retirement. The model customer was an individual, conscientious and self-reliant, typically male, and financially sophisticated. Advertisements suggested to readers that saving for retirement is a difficult and anxious task, the complexities of which the companies stood ready to manage. The savings goal - retirement itself - was depicted in only a minority of ads, underscoring its life-course givenness and desirability. Ads with an image of retirement showed an emancipatory life stage of active leisure underwritten by financial security. The ultimate commodity for sale was rationality of a remote and near kind: an eventual retirement that is controllable, and a financial path to that state that is routine and orderly. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-010511204 A |
| Classmark | GA: J: WV: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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