Merging risk and financial communication: Understanding how Prudential creates and solves the retirement risk

Abstract

As the number of people nearing or entering the retirement phase of careers continues to grow, financial service companies, like Prudential Financial, will become increasingly important to the public. This point is especially true given that there is a lack of preparedness surrounding retirement planning. This project explores how Prudential discursively constructed the concept of retirement through a qualitative content analysis of the organizational website. Results show that Prudential used a traditional problem–solution persuasive framework as it situated retirement as a risk and offered self-serving solutions that could mitigate the potential threat. Specifically, risk was constructed through the construction of a grand narrative that showed challenges associated with retirement and relied on trusted sources and rational evidence. The solution was then depicted as an efficacious process that was future-oriented through the telling of stories by current retirees. Based on these findings, a set of theoretical contributions regarding retirement and risk communication were developed, including the extension of risk communication to the financial sector and showing how organizations can simultaneously use grand and individual narratives to both highlight and resolve a potential threat. Ultimately, this research provides the opportunity to further examine how the concept of retirement is constructed by organizations through the lens of risk communication.