The New Persuaders:
social media, influencers and buy now pay later

The same playbook, sharper tools

Nothing in the last decade of consumer marketing is conceptually new. Wanting Things You Didn't Before? how the desire is manufactured covered the psychology; Planned Obsolescence: which claims hold up, and what repairability is worth covered the manufactured replacement cycle.

What's changed is precision and friction. Today's tools can target an individual's specific insecurities rather than a demographic's general ones, and can turn a scroll into a purchase in fewer steps than any previous generation faced.

Influence, industrialized

social media replaced the mass-market ad with something more targeted and more trusted: a recommendation that arrives looking like a friend's genuine enthusiasm rather than a company's paid pitch.

Algorithmic targeting tunes that pitch to an individual's browsing history, purchase history, and even their emotional state at a given moment — something no 1950s researcher's small-sample interview could approach at scale.

The underlying mechanism is still Wanting Things You Didn't Before? how the desire is manufactured's: manufactured desire, status comparison, an anxiety resolved by a purchase. But the targeting is personal rather than demographic, and the volume is constant rather than seasonal.

Buy Now, Pay Later: friction removed by design

Buy Now Pay Later apps are this era's version of the installment plan and the mailed credit card at once. Financing embedded at the point of sale, approved in seconds, needing no separate application most users would notice as a credit decision.

Usage has grown fast and real. BNPL use has reached 16 percent of US adults over the past year, up from 10 percent a few years earlier — and the growth isn't evenly distributed.

It skews meaningfully younger: 22 percent among 18-to-29-year-olds, against 9 percent for those 60 and older. It skews lower-income: 18 percent for households under $25,000, against 12 percent for those earning $100,000 or more. And it skews by race: roughly 29 percent among Black adults and 26 percent among Hispanic adults, against 11 to 12 percent among white and Asian adults.¹ Regulators' market data, drawn from several major providers, shows tens of millions of users and tens of billions of dollars in loan volume in a single recent year.²

The gap in the data

One limitation deserves stating plainly, because it's the kind of gap this track keeps finding.

There is currently no reliable, industry-wide measure of how often BNPL loans go delinquent. Most BNPL lenders don't report loan performance to the three major credit bureaus the way card issuers do.³ Regulators have had to assemble partial estimates from individual lenders' disclosures rather than pull a clean number the way they can for credit cards.

That gap is itself worth noticing. An entire category of consumer debt has scaled to tens of billions of dollars a year with less independent visibility into how it's performing than any comparable lending product carries.

The regulatory story is unusually current and unusually unresolved. In 2024 the federal consumer finance regulator issued a rule treating BNPL providers like card issuers under existing consumer-protection law. That rule was formally withdrawn in 2025, with the regulator confirming it did not intend to replace it.⁴ Oversight has shifted, for now, to individual states rather than federal law.

And whether frictionless checkout itself — as opposed to BNPL as a product — measurably increases impulse spending is a genuinely emerging research question, not a settled one. The honest answer today is that it's a well-reasoned hypothesis with real theoretical backing, not a proven causal finding.

Where Plenee fits

The tools change every few years. The discipline that answers them doesn't.

Visibility into every BNPL commitment alongside every other obligation — not siloed in a separate app most budgeting tools never see — is the direct answer to financing designed to feel disconnected from the rest of a household's picture. A BNPL payment is still a payment. Your coreFLOW doesn't care whether an obligation arrived through a bank statement or a checkout-page toggle.

The takeaway

social media and BNPL are new distribution channels for an old strategy: manufacture the want, then remove the friction between wanting and buying. The data on BNPL's growth, and its skew toward younger, lower-income and disproportionately Black and Hispanic users, is real and well-sourced. The data on exactly how risky it is remains genuinely incomplete, because most lenders don't report performance the way older credit products do — a gap worth naming rather than papering over with an invented number.