‘Buy Now Pay Later’ services want women in ‘cute debt’

The distinctly gendered marketing of these financial services is pushing women into a phenomenon known as ‘cute debt’.

I hate to be the popcorn feminist who assumes anything pink must be targeting women – but let’s face it, marketing is often a simple as it seems. In fact, that’s kind of the whole point. Visual advertising needs to be easily digestible, grabbing our attention in milliseconds and making us spend our hard earned cash on things we don’t need (or much want).

This means that marketing tends to (often successfully) prey on our limiting beliefs and deep-rooted prejudices – even though we convince ourselves we’re above them.

This heavy use of pink to target a distinctly female consumer base is something I’ve been noticing a lot lately – in the fintech industry. I’m talking specifically about Buy Now Pay Later services like Klarna and Clearpay, which have ballooned in popularity since the pandemic and dominated the retail sector ever since.

The correlation between these credit services and fast fashion has already been explored in depth, but the recent feminisation of BNPL marketing is a phenomenon with insidious roots and consequences – the main one being something Annie Joy Williams has dubbed ‘Cute Debt’.

Williams’ cites Klarna’s collab with Paris Hilton on a recent ‘House of Y2K’ campaign as just one example of the saccharine girly-pop-ification of modern fintech.

‘Klarna also partnered with fast-fashion brand Shein on pop-up stores, including a bubble-gum-pink part bus/travelling store emblazoned with the phrase In Pink We Trust,’ writes Williams. ‘Murals in Los Angeles and New York featured illustrations of cute strawberries and ice-cream cones and the tagline Afterpay is like eating a whole carton and spreading the calories out over 6 weeks.’

Besides the grossly outdated weight messaging embedded in the last example, these marketing ploys feel like lazy attempts to encourage female spending. But it seems to be working – at least where BNPL is concerned.

While men generally have more debt than women, the latter are 68% more likely to use installment payment services such as Afterpay and Klarna, according to a 2024 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

Jessa Loomis’ feminist reading of fintech services like BNPL serves as a parallel reading to these findings. Her 2024 paper on the subject looks at how fintech may exacerbate inequalities archetypal of traditional finance, whilst introducing new ones through the emergence of BNPL debt.

‘BNPL is a fintech intervention that attempts to shift consumer practices with distinctly gendered implications for social reproduction, household finance, and everyday relations to debt and money,’ Loomis argues. ‘This is particularly salient since, demographically, the majority of users of BNPL are young and women.’