Selling retirement in financial planning advertisements

The nature of, and course toward, retirement are perennial issues that the financial services industry bids to define. We used a sample of print advertisements for retirement financial planning from 1997 to 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. Worthy traits notwithstanding, ads suggested to readers that saving for retirement is a difficult and anxious task, the complexity of which the companies stood ready to manage. The savings gear - 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 necessary financial security. The ultimate commodity for sale here 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. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.