Peloton: a storm over a static bike
If you are familiar with Peloton, it might be because it is beloved by many celebrities, said Molly Fleming in Marketing Week. But if the firm has only just come to your notice, chances are that is due to its Christmas ad – which has got everyone talking, for all the wrong reasons. For those who don’t know, Peloton is a brand of upmarket exercise bike. Fitted with a tablet, these cost £1,900; you then pay £39 a month to take part in spin classes from home. Tapping into the lucrative “wellness” market, Peloton was recently valued at $4bn. But last week, 15% was knocked off its value after social media users complained that its new ad – about a woman who is given a bike by her husband – is sexist, patronising, and even “dystopian”.
Set in a sleek modern home, the ad features the woman being presented with her new bike, and filming herself using it over the course of a year: she is nervous at first, then starts waking at 6am to pedal away. At the end, this montage is revealed to be a “thank you” to her husband: “I didn’t realise how much this would change me,” she says – as the camera shows them watching her video streamed to their TV. Peloton says it wanted to celebrate the woman’s “wellness journey”, but the ad is pretty odd, said Amanda Mull in The Atlantic. For one thing, the “Peloton wife” looks very anxious, leading to speculation that she is in an abusive marriage. As one social media user put it: “She doesn’t need a Peloton. She needs a therapist and a divorce lawyer.”
It’s not a great ad, but I can’t help feeling the outrage about it was confected, said Jackie Gingrich Cushman in the Boston Herald. People complained that the woman was slim to start with, but if the gift was really so “bodyshaming”, surely it would have been worse if she’d been fat. Maybe the ad is not about taking exercise to get thinner, but to get happier. My guess is that people’s anger is not so much with the ad itself, as with the “wellness culture” it encapsulates, said Caira Conner on NBC News – a culture “overrun with privilege and high-end consumerism”. We live in a society where lots of wealthy people can spend thousands on static bikes, while others live hand to mouth. “It’s not fair, but it’s not unique to Peloton.”