Courting the Novice Investor: Financial Seduction in the Context of a Nordic Welfare State

Abstract

The expansion of financialised capitalism has increasingly compelled actors in the banking and financial sector to engage with population groups that have traditionally remained outside the sphere of financial investment practices. Over recent decades, the number of small household investors has grown substantially. This article asks the following questions: Given the inherent complexity and uncertainty of financial markets, how do banks appeal to customer segments with limited familiarity with financial theory and practice? What kinds of narratives underpin their marketing strategies? The analysis demonstrates how these narratives are crafted through emotive, moral, and cognitive elements tailored to customers situated in specific phases of the life course. The concept of financial seductibility serves as an analytical lens, highlighting how the appeal of financial products is highly context-dependent. The article thereby enriches and adds classificatory nuance to the literature on household financialisation.

1. Introduction

The spread of financial investment practices has been a pronounced feature of the last 40 years’ expansion in the banking and financial sector, often described by the concept of “financialisation” (Epstein 2005; Van der Zwan 2014). One important aspect is the increasing flow of household savings into financial markets. Ordinary people are becoming financial investors. In this article, I explore the methods used by financial business actors to reach potential new groups of customers. I examine how financial product marketing is tailored to specific age segments, exemplified by two groups: adolescents and young adult women. Historically, neither of these groups has been a particularly active financial investor, and they therefore represent a reservoir of potential new business for financial institutions.

My starting point is an assumption that a key attribute of financial markets is their complexity and uncertainty. This confronts the banking and financial industry with a predicament that is not present to the same extent in other product markets: For their marketing efforts to be effective, financial figures and metrics must be communicated in a way that renders them interpretable for laypeople. My overarching research question is thus: given the markets’ complexities and uncertainties, how do banks appeal to customers not familiar with financial theory and practices? More specifically, I look more closely into what types of narratives banks use in their marketing efforts to reach new customer groups.

Following Ossandón et al. (2022, p. 1484), I refer to banks’ attempts to recruit new customers as forms of “attachment operations”, i.e., they express the practical problematic of aligning households’ everyday economic issues with financial technology. Previous research has shown how financial decision-making is not a question of rational cognition alone, but rather that emotionality and morality are also important aspects. However, these aspects have not been much discussed in relation to the various advertising practices of banks and financial institutions. This article attempts to help bridge the knowledge gaps on this particular topic.

Empirically, the article studies marketing material used by DNB, Norway’s largest commercial bank. The Norwegian context is interesting because, whilst much of the research on the financialisation of households has focused on Anglo-Saxon countries, where neoliberal welfare reforms could be said to have necessitated households’ involvement in financial saving practices, such structural pressures are far more relaxed in the still generous Norwegian welfare state. Yet, Norwegians are increasingly turning to financial markets in their everyday saving practices1. Furthermore, Norwegians are comparatively financially literate. International comparisons put the country at the very top, together with its Nordic neighbours (Klapper et al. 2015). While financial literacy rates tend to exhibit gender differences (Lusardi and Mitchell 2023), this varies in the Norwegian context. While Norwegian men do generally outperform women in financial ability (AksjeNorge 2016)—similar to most countries—Norway has expanded the role of financial education in secondary school curricula. The latest round of PISA testing concluded that girls now slightly outperform boys (Jensen et al. 2024).

The abovementioned aspects are important because the article demonstrates how banks’ marketing efforts are highly attentive to contexts, and in the case of a Norwegian bank’s attachment operations, they are structured according to the gender and life-course phase of the intended recipients. When it is directed towards adolescents, the composition of emotionality and rationality is different from when it is directed towards women at a phase in their life course when many presumably are planning for family life. Secondly, efforts to form attachment are also attentive to the national cultural context. For example, progressive values like gender equity and “green” environmentalism are widespread in Norway and are important components of the Norwegian national imaginary (Eckersley 2016; Holst and Teigen 2021). As we will see, banks rely heavily on such values in their product marketing.

Based on my analysis, I propose that the notion of financial seductibility captures a dimension of financial products that often eludes discussions of financial expansion and the financialisation of everyday life (Langley 2008; Van der Zwan 2014). Following Bay et al. (2014), I argue that the practical know-how—the “literacy”—required to use financial instruments must be “situated” in ways that evoke a sense of positive emotional familiarity on the part of the customer. For such a form of seduction to be effective, potential new customers must grasp basic financial metrics, conventions, and modes of reasoning, but these are re-presented as carrying emotional and moral properties and even possibilities for civic engagement. I contend that attending to this dimension is particularly important for scholars seeking to understand how segments of the population who lack prior experience with, or knowledge of, financial technology are nonetheless enrolled as investors. The concept of financial seductibility may further illuminate how the attractiveness of financial products is shaped by contextual factors and can help differentiate between the structuring tools and techniques employed by banks and financial institutions to imbue financial products and practices with an element of seduction.

2. Financialisation and the Marketing of Finance

Over the past four decades, states, private firms, and households have become increasingly entangled with financial market technologies and practices. Households now rely on financial technologies and investment products to meet basic needs and to manage their long-term economic planning to a far greater extent than before. Much of the existing literature on this “financialisation of the everyday” (Langley 2008; Martin 2002) has examined the liabilities side of household balance sheets, particularly mortgage markets, consumer credit, and credit card debt (Aalbers et al. 2020; Montgomerie 2009; Stockhammer and Kohler 2020). Yet, households have also expanded their direct ownership of financial securities. Today, stock markets constitute a preferred arena for household savings, contributing to what some scholars describe as a “culture of mass investment” (Aitken 2005; Edwards 2022; Fligstein and Goldstein 2015; Harrington 2008). Although unevenly developed and internally diverse, this investment culture nonetheless shapes people’s subjectivities, everyday practices, and economic preferences (Coppock 2013; Deville 2014; Langley 2007; Pellandini-Simányi et al. 2015).

In contrast, considerably less attention has been devoted to examining how this culture is produced and disseminated. One strand of research highlights the structural pressures associated with the neoliberal era’s gradual erosion of social safety nets and the increasing precariousness of life chances. Across much of the world, individuals are now expected to save privately for future risks and uncertainties, rather than relying on state-based protection. A central policy response has been the promotion of household investment in financial securities. In cooperation with international organisations and private actors, many states have introduced educational programmes aimed at cultivating “financial literacy”—that is, the practical skills and cognitive frameworks required to navigate financial technologies, instruments, and modes of reasoning (Finlayson 2009; Maman and Rosenhek 2019; OECD 2015; Pettersson and Wettergren 2021).

Regardless of the underlying causes, scholars have documented a marked shift in how people perceive the proper role of financial markets in society. Historically, in most countries, financial investment practices were viewed with suspicion and often associated with gambling, recklessness, or even moral depravity2 (Aitken 2005; De Goede 2005; Preda 2009). Today, by contrast, the “cultural figure of the investor” (Preda 2005) increasingly encompasses the general public—individuals equipped with little more than an app on their smartphone, rather than expert knowledge or formal credentials.

This expansion of finance’s social legitimacy is, however, uneven. In the Anglo-Saxon countries in particular, growing support for financial markets has been especially pronounced among the middle classes. Having accumulated personal “skin in the game,” they have come to endorse policies such as bailouts for banks and corporations during times of crisis (Chwieroth and Walter 2019; Pagliari et al. 2020). Chwieroth and Walter attribute this significant shift in the legitimacy of financial markets to structural “necessity”: individuals have become financial subjects because they must now secure funding for private retirement schemes, children’s college tuition, healthcare, and housing. Policy preferences, they argue, follow from these material conditions (Chwieroth and Walter 2019, p. 29).

However, when people come to see financial markets as not only legitimate but also as a suitable and rational realm for everyday economic affairs, more is at play than a structurally determined swing in policy preferences. The financial sector’s increased economic power is intimately linked to its corresponding power and cultivation of meaning in the realm of culture (Haiven 2014).

One dimension of this active cultivation can be observed in the incorporation of financial technology into mass consumer society. Financial institutions—often in concert with governments and the publishing industry—have engaged in sustained ideological efforts to normalise share ownership, portraying financial securities as comparable to ordinary consumer goods (Edwards 2017). Tracing this development in Great Britain, Edwards (2022) terms the outcome “financial consumerism,” referring to “a series of cultural, political, and institutional processes that encourage individuals to adopt a relationship with personal finance predicated on the consumption of financial products” (Edwards 2022, p. 95). This involves representing the purchase of financial securities not only as an act of self-interest but also as a means for individuals to demonstrate responsibility toward their community (Edwards 2017, p. 215).

In the material analysed in this article, we encounter an expression of the same phenomenon, situated within the context of a Nordic welfare state: financial investment “products” marketed as ordinary consumer goods and linked to notions of citizenship. In this way, they become imbued with emotional, moral, and cultural significance, much like the sense of youthfulness projected by Nike shoes or the depiction of a local insurance broker as an extension of intimate family ties3 (Illouz 2009; McFall and Dodsworth 2009). Financial technology thus not only shapes and facilitates everyday consumption practices—for example, by expanding access to credit (Evans and Gregson 2023)—but also becomes an object of consumerism in its own right, defined and legitimised through a variety of cultural frameworks.

It is well established that private companies seek to associate their brands with political, social, and cultural identities and that they frequently appropriate feminist language and symbolism (Prügl 2015; Sterbenk et al. 2022), environmental causes (de Freitas Netto et al. 2020; Szabo and Webster 2021), and issues related to LGBTQ rights (Philip 2024). Yet, comparatively little attention has been paid to how financial firms, in practice, draw on the emotionality and moral framings characteristic of commercial advertising. Given the financialisation of everyday life outlined above, expanding the consumption of financial technology products among the broader population is presumably a key strategic concern for banking and financial actors.

My argument is that, in order to render economic indicators meaningful to ordinary people, actors in the banking and financial industry employ many of the same tactics used in other forms of advertising. These strategies make it possible for consumer groups to form symbolically and emotionally charged attachments to financial technologies as if they were ordinary consumer goods (Heath et al. 2006). Crucially, financial institutions deploy such tactics for reasons that are particularly salient within financial markets themselves.

3. Financial Seductibility and Product Advertising

Economic decision-making in financial markets is plagued by high degrees of uncertainty and complexity4. When a financial problem presents itself, there may be no unitary model of truth that actors can depend upon. To make decision-making manageable, actors therefore rely on fictional interpretative frameworks that allow them to imagine outcomes as if they could be accurately predicted (Beckert 2016). Financial theory is one such interpretative framework. It seeks to turn uncertainty into calculable risks through mathematical modelling and thereby provides actors with a cognitive framework for making the complexity and opaqueness of markets manageable, regardless of its actual ability to predict future outcomes.

However, financial decision-making has also been shown to rely on cultural imaginaries and emotional registers5 (De Bondt 2005; Gambetti and Giusberti 2012; Lai 2017; Marston et al. 2018). Moreover, governmental programmes promoting “financial literacy”6 are suffused with moralising discourses and with both explicit and implicit references to emotions and emotional states associated with everyday financial practices (Maman and Rosenhek 2023, p. 188; Pettersson and Wettergren 2021). As Bay et al. (2014) argue, financial literacy is situated and context-dependent: its formulation unfolds within, and becomes relevant through, particular social settings, and even when acquired, it does not automatically translate into economic decision-making.

This has important implications for those seeking to advertise financial products. The target audience must be able to cognitively comprehend a specific set of technical information, but they must also be able to relate numbers and financial indicators to their everyday lives by imagining financial practices as meaningful. In other words, financial practices and ways of thinking must not only be represented accurately but also re-presented in ways that make a particular interpretation appear both credible and meaningful (Bay 2018, p. 45).

Below, I examine how such operations of attachment are constructed and mobilised in the marketing of financial products. I argue that emotional and moral registers play a crucial role in generating sufficient enchantment for novice investors to engage. To develop this claim, I draw on Reddy’s (1997) concept of emotives. Emotives are statements of emotion that articulate a desired emotional state without necessarily describing an existing one. They evoke the desired emotion through their performativity and function as “instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, [and] intensifying emotions” (Reddy 1997, p. 331; see also Pettersson and Wettergren 2021).

Building on this perspective, I propose the term financial seductibility to capture the dimension of financial technologies’ appeal that derives from the deployment of emotive and moral registers. The concept refers to a particular quality of these “operations of attachment”, that is, the ways in which financial products—and the literacies required to engage with them—are constructed not only as beneficial but also as familiar, embedded in everyday life, and in alignment with prevailing social norms and moral expectations. Crucially, financial seductibility highlights that successful attachment to financial products and investment practices is contingent upon specific cultural and social contexts.

While previous research has examined financialised cultures (Aitken 2005; Edwards 2022; Fligstein and Goldstein 2015; Harrington 2008) and financial subjectivities (Coppock 2013; Deville 2014; Langley 2007; Pellandini-Simányi et al. 2015), it has had less to say about how such constructions become appealing in the first place. In what follows, I seek to demonstrate that seduction constitutes an important part of the answer.

4. Methods and Data

The article is based on an extensive mapping of advertising and marketing material produced by Norway’s largest commercial bank, DNB. The core aim is to illuminate the cultural tools employed by the financial industry to draw in segments of the population who have previously not engaged in financial saving practices beyond collecting traditional bank interest. By examining processes of meaning-making in the industry’s marketing and its “storying process” (Gubrium and Holstein 2008), the research strategy resembles a narrative analysis. The unit of analysis is not the content of the marketing material itself, but rather the ways in which various cultural resources are organised into a narrative structure designed to appear credible and persuasive (Riessman 2017).

Empirically, the article is delimited by a specific focus on DNB. As Norway’s largest bank, DNB employs multiple platforms in its marketing toward different customer groups in Norway and the Nordic region. The article draws on data from two sources:

The first source consists of DNB’s self-produced marketing videos, published on the bank’s website and on its YouTube channel. These include both traditional TV commercials and instructional video series intended to introduce customers to savings and investment products. DNB’s YouTube videos are organised into playlists. I selected those playlists pertaining to saving and investment, resulting in a sample of 18 videos. The videos were collected from the bank’s YouTube channel7. I produced summaries and reflective notes for each episode, which were subsequently compiled into “ethnographic fieldnotes” (pp. 1–3).

The second source comprises ethnographic data from conferences organised by DNB as part of the campaign “#SheInvests”8. This campaign explicitly targets young women, partly by providing consumer-oriented financial information, but its main aim is to formulate a meaningful place for financial markets in young women’s lives. The campaign employs feminist language and explicitly seeks to “close the capital gap” between men and women. I attended three conferences, two of which were held in conjunction with the annual International Women’s Day. Fieldnotes 4–6 consist of reflective notes from these conferences.

The empirical material was coded to identify narrative structure in both the video notes and the conference notes. My primary concern was not what happened or who participated, but how the stories were structured and how information was presented. Identifying these narrative structures involved questions such as the following: Who are the protagonists? What role do financial markets play in their lives? Which qualities of financial investments are highlighted as good or appropriate, and to what ends? How is the narrative organised to convey its message? The coding first systematised these elements descriptively before crystallising the overarching tools employed, namely, emotives (playfulness and fun versus security, anxiety and fairness) and moral registers (gender egalitarianism and environmentalism).

Taken together, the empirical cases demonstrate key features of how morality and emotionality are mobilised—how financial seduction narratives are constructed in this context. Although the narrative structure is specific to this empirical setting, the cases are intended to function “emblematically” (Gobo 2008), making it possible to identify general characteristics of the phenomenon.

5. Seductibility in Financial Advertising

In what follows, I examine how seductibility is embedded within the narrative structures of the advertisements included in the empirical material. The analysis proceeds along the dimensions that emerge from the data. The first concerns a narrative structure that re-presents financial investment practices as a game-like form of sociality, mirroring the dynamics of adolescents’ social media lives. The second involves a narrative that deploys emotives of safety and social justice to appeal to women planning for family life. Both narrative strategies draw upon and seek to “situate” (Bay et al. 2014) elements of financial literacy, making them resonate with practices and concerns in the everyday lives of specific population groups9.

5.1. Narratives of Enjoyment, Fun and Games

The first video series features Levi and Cornelia, two young adults in their early twenties who express a desire to learn about financial investing. They appear typical—and in many respects they are. Norwegian youth are both relatively well educated10 and comparatively affluent. In fact, 53 percent of Norwegians aged 18–30 invest in mutual funds (Høidahl 2022). They have therefore become an important segment of potential customers for Norwegian banking and financial institutions.

The videos are short, fast-paced, and informational—no more than two to three minutes each—and introduce the basic mechanics of financial markets. Viewers learn what stocks and mutual funds are, and why concepts such as risk–reward trade-offs and diversification matter. Yet, investing is presented not merely through factual explanations; it is infused with a sense of fun and playfulness. Accompanied by techno music and edited in a style reminiscent of social media formats, the videos convey that investing is enjoyable and easily accessible through an app on a smartphone, tablet, or computer. In conversation with a representative of the Norwegian financial industry’s business association, Levi and Cornelia learn not only about the calculable rationality involved in buying shares and bonds but also about the pleasures associated with participating in financial markets.

Pointing to Cornelia’s clothes, the representative remarks: ‘But you already know a lot about stocks!’ Her Nike shoes are produced by a publicly listed company, as are her clothes from Hennes & Mauritz. In other words, Cornelia already possesses knowledge about what is popular and what people like her tend to buy. This kind of everyday consumer insight—combined with ‘reading the morning reports from your bank’—is presented as sufficient know-how for selecting individual stocks. A text appearing on the screen adds that she would ‘have to do the whole job herself’, but that this would be ‘fun, because you would be your own investment manager’.

(Ethnographic field note 2)

Hence, mobilising the emotives of fun and playfulness seeks to link financial investing to the everyday lives of young people. The videos invite viewers to perceive investing as directly connected to their experiences as consumers. Cornelia learns that the practice of identifying undervalued stocks is not confined to bankers and professional investors. She already knows enough to participate, precisely because she can draw on her everyday knowledge as a teenager. By situating financial investment practices within familiar environments, the videos reorganise the meanings associated with them, creating both compatibility with—and a method for—adolescents’ engagement in buying and selling investment products. In this imaginary, market uncertainties appear as opportunities, as games to be played through an app on one’s phone, rather than as risks to be avoided. Moreover, taking advantage of such opportunities is portrayed as unrelated to one’s financial position: even the smallest amounts of money can be “put to work” to capitalise on market dynamics.

Evoking emotives of fun, games, and excitement potentially enables customers—here, primarily adolescents—to form attachments to financial instruments in ways that a purely technical presentation of financial conventions likely could not. DNB is attempting to situate what it means to be financially literate in ways they expect will appeal to Norwegian youth. They do so not by replacing established conventions for how to conduct oneself in financial markets, but by infusing the content of financial literacy—here, risk–reward calculations—with an emotive energy of fun and playfulness that may appear familiar and attractive to young people. This is not entirely new in financial marketing11, yet the videos illustrate how finance’s appeal is constructed in explicit contrast to the seriousness, longevity, and technocratic aura that often characterise the domain.

Moreover, when viewed in relation to the other narrative strategies identified in the empirical material, a paradoxical feature of everyday financial investment practices becomes visible. On the one hand, investing is presented as an expression of risk-taking—the willingness to assume risks that may, over time, generate returns. On the other hand, financial markets are simultaneously framed as an arena for diversification, that is, for diluting and mitigating the risks associated with asset ownership. Which side of this paradox is foregrounded as a marker of proper financial literacy depends entirely on the intended audience. Levi and Cornelia contribute to constructing one particular imaginary of what it means to act as an investor, one that embraces the normative value of taking risks and selecting “winners” in the stock market. Their most pronounced contrast appears in a separate video series: the one dedicated to the #SheInvests campaign.

5.2. Narratives of Anxiety and Taking Control of an Unequal World

In these videos, DNB draws on two overarching emotives tailored to young women—a demographic that has historically participated less in financial saving practices. The first is the emotive of long-term economic safety. In the #SheInvests campaign, investing is not presented as a fun game but, on the contrary, as a means of hedging against future uncertainties. This is underscored by the emphasis on the long-term horizons of financial portfolio management. Throughout the campaign, the fear of “missing out” functions as a central motif, creating a sense of urgency to begin saving and investing as soon as possible.

However, and in contrast to what has been observed in governmental financial literacy programmes (Maman and Rosenhek 2019), the campaign is careful not to moralise. The host of both the video series and one of the associated conferences repeatedly stresses that she has never struggled with saving money. Her mistake, she explains, was preferring the safety of deposit accounts. Had she possessed the foresight to invest in global index funds 10 or 15 years earlier, she insists, her wealth—and thus her financial security—would have been substantially greater.

She refers to it as a ‘horror story’: having saved substantial amounts of money—for 24 years—in a regular savings account. She jokes that one can tell from her inexpensive clothes, and then asks what her wealth would have been had she ‘saved financially’ throughout her entire adult life. Why, then, did she not do so earlier? She explains that she was unaware, or even ignorant—that she had never been presented with a ‘map’ for how to proceed. ‘That’s why we’re gathered here tonight’, she concludes.

(Ethnographic field note 4)

The issue, then, is not her character but her lack of knowledge. In other words, the long-term effect of compound interest is not merely a matter of common sense; it is presented as a mechanism for securing one’s future financial wellbeing. This illustrates how, in DNB’s advertising, the logic of financial reasoning replaces thrift and insurance with investment as the basis of a rational saving routine (Langley 2008). The risks inherent in financial markets are not portrayed as something to be avoided. Long-term saving should not take place in deposit accounts; rather, future financial security is depicted as the outcome of investing in securities, of embracing market risks. The true financial fear, according to this narrative, is the fear of missing out.

Furthermore, both in the video series and in the ethnographic material, repeated references are made to the domestic sphere. At one conference, a parallel is drawn between gendered domestic roles and risk aversion in financial markets.

Using an analogy drawn from household roles, the speaker discusses various ‘types’ of investors. Three types—1, 2, and 3—are outlined, each mapped onto a corresponding domestic role. Consider the example of watching sports on television. The husband, she suggests, typically follows football closely, tracking injuries, past results, and other details. This behaviour resembles that of a type 3 investor: someone who selects individual companies for their portfolio and continuously performs proper due diligence.

The wife, by contrast, watches a game occasionally—perhaps to gain some goodwill with her husband (‘bonus points’, as the speaker jokingly puts it)—but it requires little of her attention. This aligns with the type 1 investor, who finds passively managed global index funds sufficient.

A parallel thus emerges between the organisation of intimate, gendered relations in the home and the structuring of financial saving practices: a symbolic linkage between the familiar and the financial, between gender and investor roles. Type 2 represents the daughter, positioned in the middle. She is interested in sports, but not to the same extent as her father. Picking up knowledge here and there, she would most likely invest in actively managed mutual funds—products that require some degree of attention and competence, but not for every investment decision, nor on a daily basis.

(Ethnographic field note 6)

The role of financial investing is thus made to resemble the naturalised ordering of intimate relations within the home. Consumers of DNB’s investment products are encouraged to associate them with the safety and familiarity of the domestic sphere. Tailored specifically to younger women, the message reassures them that there is indeed a place in financial markets that accommodates risk aversion and the long-term orientation associated with building a household.

The campaign, therefore, employs gendered and traditional ideas of household roles as symbolic resources for creating a sense of familiarity. Yet, this is not its central thrust. As its title indicates, gender is the overarching thematic concern. Whereas the Levi and Cornelia videos make no reference to gender or gender roles, the #SheInvests campaign is saturated with them. Drawing on the language of feminism and broader women’s empowerment movements, the explicit aim of the campaign is to “close the capital gap,” that is, to reduce the disparity between men’s and women’s ownership of financial assets. This is particularly evident at a conference organised in connection with International Women’s Day on 8 March. At one such event, a well-known author and linguist unpacked the gendered nature of everyday language before demonstrating similar patterns in financial discourse. She concluded her talk in the following way:

Let us allow boys to show emotions and cry without being called girls. Let us stop congratulating women by comparing them to men. Language is power. And let us continue advancing into the economic sphere—into what for so long was a male domain. Money, too, is power

(Ethnographic field note 5)

In this case, feminist rhetoric is employed to ascribe financial products with the additional symbolic value of promoting gender equality. By situating financial capability in this way, the role of the investor is “translated” into something other than that of a gambler, a Wall Street tycoon, or the household’s savvy male breadwinner. Instead, investing is framed as a practice that should be generalised—something for everyone who cares about equality. As the host of the #SheInvests campaign states, “If we are to take part in running the world—us, women—well, then we also have to take part in owning it.” This resembles marketing strategies that scholars have argued “neoliberalise” feminism (Prügl 2015), yet it takes on a particular salience in the context of a Scandinavian social democracy with strong egalitarian traditions, such as Norway. Gender equity policies enjoy broad support across voter segments (Midtbøen and Teigen 2019), and the Norwegian state brands itself internationally as a frontrunner in women’s rights (Holst and Teigen 2021). Moreover, Norway has exceptionally high female labour-force participation12—an important structural condition enabling women to engage with DNB’s messaging. Overall, gender equality functions as a “national value” in Norway, making it unsurprising that commercial actors would appropriate it. We can thus see how the element of seduction is always attuned to contextual factors.

Furthermore, gender equality is not the only progressive political cause celebrated in the #SheInvests campaign. Several interviews feature ordinary women who describe DNB’s products as a means of influencing environmental causes, often under the somewhat vague label of “green” mutual funds. As with gender equality, environmentalism is an integral component of the Norwegian national imaginary13. How, then, is it woven into financial product marketing? In one episode of DNB’s video series, we meet a well-known Norwegian Olympic athlete:

Episode 5 is titled ‘Investing for the Future’. The featured athlete explains that she has always been good at saving money, preferring mutual funds that invest in the stock market. She presents her financial planning decisions as expressions of ethical commitments, particularly concerning ‘climate and environmental issues’. She wants companies to take social responsibility seriously, and she frames choosing the ‘right’ funds as an act of ‘taking part in shaping the future. I intend to use that power’. A perspective centered on power is thus central to her confidence in investing. She argues that it is entirely possible to obtain ‘a little bit better return on your money, at the same time as you nudge the world in a better direction’.

In other words, progressive political values are portrayed as fully compatible with participation in financial markets—in fact, as mutually reinforcing. One can increase one’s own security and long-term economic wellbeing while simultaneously contributing to a more equal and ecologically sustainable world. In this narrative, it all fits seamlessly together.

(Ethnographic field note 3)

The future imagined here draws on resources beyond the calculability of financial modelling. It presupposes conventional financial reasoning, and it is precisely by invoking the commonsense conventions of financial theory that DNB seeks to make financial technology manageable for new groups of customers. Yet, the bank also tries to ascribe to these technologies the power to generate possible—often contradictory—future states of the world, ones that extend beyond narrow metrics of financial yield or individual self-interest. Indeed, DNB does not merely seek a space for ethical and political language at the center of financial practice. It invites young women to structure their entire personal financial lives around explicitly articulated ethical and political commitments.

Evoking emotives of anxiety and justice is therefore central to this particular imaginary of what it means to conduct oneself as properly financially literate. Such attempts to create market attachment must be finely attuned to specific audiences embedded in national discursive contexts. Whereas adolescents are approached by situating the relation between risk and reward within the idioms of fun and play, a different set of concerns is mobilised in financial messaging aimed at women in a life-course phase of establishing a family. Here, the financially literate young woman motivates herself, secures her family’s economic future through asset diversification, and infuses her financial due diligence with ethical and political concerns.

What, then, does all this reveal about the role of narrative in attempts to reshape financial practices in people’s everyday lives?

6. Concluding Discussion

In this article, I have examined what the construction of financial products’ attractiveness looks like in empirical practice. In a world where financialisation extends its calculative logic and modes of reasoning throughout society, it becomes crucial to understand how finance is rendered intelligible and meaningful to people who are neither trained in financial theory nor experienced in market operations.

The analysis has explored how a Norwegian bank addresses the practical challenge of attaching (Ossandón et al. 2022) ordinary individuals to intangible financial instruments. I have argued that persuading novice investors involves narratives infused with elements of seduction. By this, I mean that marketing the virtues of financial practices and products is not simply a matter of transmitting cognitive capability or conveying a discrete body of information. Rather, it is a matter of situating financial literacy (Bay et al. 2014)—of making it applicable, resonant, and actionable within the everyday lives of specific populations in particular contexts.

The seductive component communicates commonsensical conventions about how financial information should be interpreted and how one ought to behave. Yet, it does so in a distinctive way. The narrative structures through which investing is presented—stories about how one becomes financially literate—operate as invitations to think, feel, and act as market participants in ways that extend beyond stylised models of utility-maximising behaviour. In other words, the marketing of financial products concerns the translation—not the mere transmission—of financial literacy.

The content of this translation can, of course, vary depending on numerous factors. In this article, I have examined the role of emotionality and morality in advertisements for DNB, a Norwegian bank. I have suggested that the notion of financial seductibility may help capture this dimension. The term denotes certain properties of the attractiveness ascribed to financial products. Emotionally charged statements and symbolics—emotives—are tailored to fit seamlessly into the everyday practices of novice customers situated within a specific social and cultural context.

In Norway, we have seen that DNB employs emotional levers that are strongly structured according to life-course phases and gender. Operating in a context where young people tend to be both relatively well educated and relatively financially secure, the vision of investment they are offered is one of play and game-like excitement. These narratives are largely free from references to gender roles or expectations and instead enhance their attractiveness by mobilising emotional energy through tropes of fun and gamification. At the same time, young people are encouraged to relate to financial instruments as though they were ordinary consumer goods. In the examined video series, the juxtaposition between Cornelia’s shopping habits, on the one hand, and investing in individual stocks, on the other, exemplifies this strategy. A fit is suggested between the proper due diligence of the financially literate investor and the interpretive schemata of young consumers.

While adolescents are encouraged to view their investment practices as an extension of the playful sociality characteristic of their social media lives, the opposite is true for the messaging directed at women in a life-course phase where many are seeking to buy a home and start a family. For this group, far from offering game-like thrills, investing in financial markets is framed as the very opposite: a means of hedging against future contingencies. Financial technology is presented as a set of tools that knowledgeable consumers use to safeguard both their own and their family’s long-term economic wellbeing.

For example, in the #SheInvests campaign, safety functions as an overarching concern and is portrayed as best achieved by managing life’s precariousness through a risk-adjusted portfolio of mutual funds. Yet, the dominant thrust of the campaign highlights an immaculate compatibility between financial saving practices, on the one hand, and progressive political causes, on the other. The narrative structures in online videos and conference presentations emphasise that acquiring numerical skills or mastering the vocabulary of financial investing is not the most important component of becoming financially literate. Instead, the (female) audience is encouraged to reflect on their societal roles and to adopt a mindset in which participation in financial markets constitutes a form of civic engagement.

The invocation of the alleged—and indeed very real—“capital gap” between men and women mobilises justice as an emotional lever. The bank suggests that financial securities offer young adult women expanded political and social “agency”. As familiar from research on the corporate appropriation of feminist language in branding (Prügl 2015; Roberts 2015), DNB’s campaign demonstrates how narratives merge emotives of justice with the need for security while simultaneously drawing on contextual and cultural resources and sensibilities. In other words, DNB’s advertisements illustrate how becoming capable of financial investing—becoming financially literate—is framed as both attainable for Norwegian laypeople and as a natural expression of their cultural and normative inclinations.

What the different guises of financial marketing share is a tendency to normalise investment as an everyday practice by eroding the cultural boundaries between consumption and investment. Household financialisation is closely linked to the commodification of financial technology, enabling advertising to merge emotionality with the due diligence traditionally associated with professional investors. Ultimately, the dissemination of a mass investment culture does not represent the expansion of an “iron cage” of rational calculability. On the contrary, for investment to become woven into the fabric of everyday life, it must carry affective and moral qualities. Even financialised capitalism requires a “spirit”. For its enchanters, it is as much a matter of seduction as of persuasion.

The present study has been conducted within a national context characterised by relatively low levels of social inequality and high levels of financial literacy. Future research would benefit from comparative analyses. It would be valuable, for instance, to examine how the Norwegian case differs from countries with higher levels of inequality and with alternative political, social, and cultural configurations. Does the relatively high and evenly dispersed financial literacy of a country like Norway shape how products’ seductibility is constructed?

Moreover, levels of financialisation vary across national contexts—both in terms of the depth of market integration and households’ access to financial technology. As a result, the opportunities available to banking and financial actors to reach new customer groups differ substantially, and so too might their constructions of product attractiveness. How, then, are processes of attachment enacted in structural contexts shaped by different political cleavages and institutional histories? And to what extent would the seductibility of financial products hold relevance across such variations?