Bringing Plan Sponsor Emotions Into Sharper Focus for 401(k) Brands

Plan sponsor emotions directly influence satisfaction, loyalty and plan provider switching decisions. By applying Evoke™, our new AI-powered advanced emotional analytics, firms can uncover deeper drivers of client sentiment and gain a competitive edge in retention and growth.

Ever wondered how DC plan sponsors truly feel about your brand?

For more than a decade, Escalent’s Cogent Syndicated has benchmarked firms on more than a dozen brand imagery attributes and satisfaction metrics and conducted advanced analytics to pinpoint what’s driving brand consideration, satisfaction and loyalty. This year, I’m excited to announce we are going deeper than ever before to explore how firms measure on client emotion.

In our 2026 Retirement Planscape study, we are introducing Evoke™, a proprietary emotion identification technique created by Escalent, to help firms understand how DC plan sponsors truly feel about their current 401(k) plan provider and what specifically is driving that feeling.

Based on psychologist Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions, respondents are shown a carefully curated set of 15 images and asked to select the images that best represent how they feel emotionally about their organization’s current 401(k) plan provider and asked to explain their rationale for doing so. The analysis will map back to the following set of positive, negative or neutral emotions:

The beauty of using this new proprietary technique is that in contrast to traditional methods that rely solely on words or phrases, Escalent’s Evoke™ brings more objectivity through image selection, allowing DC plan sponsors to easily articulate their emotions at a gut level, or System 1 thinking, avoiding an overreliance on their ability to describe their feelings. System 1 thinking is the brain’s fast, automatic and innate mode of processing information. As described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, “System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive, operating with little to no effort … [it] allows us to make quick decisions and judgments based on patterns and experiences.”¹

The best part? Providers will gain a clearer, data-driven view of client sentiment and emotional drivers of brand perception. On top of getting an honest reality check of how your current plan sponsor clients feel about your brand within our custom presentations, we’ll be able to compare similarities and differences within your key competitive set. In fact, we’ll have the ability to run emotional segmentation on many of the questions asked in our survey that may be of interest.

Additional New Topics of Interest

Our annual plan sponsor study also features other valuable new questions such as plan sponsors’ interest in and current use of AI-driven tools and which applications are most valuable to plan sponsors’ 401(k) plan management. We’ll be diving deeper into cybersecurity threats and pinpointing the top success metrics used to evaluate DC plan providers with respect to their cybersecurity protocols. Likewise, alternative investments are garnering increased real estate in our study, as we not only track interest in distinct offerings but also explore plan sponsor motivations for and barriers to incorporating alternatives on their investment lineups.

To help firms better differentiate themselves, we’ll also be outlining specific ways DC plan providers can demonstrate “best-in-class plan sponsor service and support” and DC investment managers can exude “brand trustworthiness,” which have historically served as the top consideration drivers on a derived basis.

Retirement Planscape publishes at the end of May. The study provides insight into the latest industry trends and benchmarks the competitive strengths and weaknesses of the leading 34 DC plan providers (including eight digital recordkeepers) and 43 DC investment managers.

For more information on the full report, click below.

¹https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system-1-and-system-2-thinking