How Not to Be Peloton (or, All I Needed to Know About UX I Learned in 3rd Grade)
Peloton wants women to feel the benefits of exercise—to reap the rewards of hard work and unflinching effort, even (especially) when the going gets rough. As an in-home exercise solution, they understand the challenges and excuses that prevent women from working out, and how sometimes a nudge from a supportive partner is just the thing to set us up on the path to wellness. How nice!
So why did their recent ad receive such backlash?
Immediately after its launch, the campaign was vilified as the sexist portrayal of an unhealthy relationship. A USA Today piece claimed the ad portrayed the “descent into the pure hell of this woman’s life” after receiving her oh-so-thoughtful present, adding that the “zeal with which she attacks the Peloton clearly speaks to some deep, unfulfilled need somewhere in her life.”
Others found it inspiring and leapt to its defense, with blogger Marie Rossiter commenting, “Watching someone take those first tentative steps into a new lifestyle is something I connect with because I’ve experienced that same nervous energy in the pit of my stomach.” Another frankly noted, “There is no objectification, cat-calling or crude remarks made in this commercial. In fact, the husband in this ad seems to make his wife very happy.”
Both sides are missing the point. The ad isn’t off-putting because of any overt sexism; it is in fact true that the ad doesn’t openly turn the woman into a sexual object and there isn’t anything obviously crude or offensive. It’s just an ad about a husband doing a nice thing for his wife—and that’s exactly the problem. The ad feels like it should be about the woman’s journey to fitness, but it’s not—nor is it an ode to her hard work. It isn’t really about her at all—it’s about her husband and his generous gift. The ad is designed to inspire men to buy their wives Pelotons.
Peloton’s mistake could have been explained by any elementary school teacher. Remember sentence diagramming? Elementary grammar teaches that every sentence/story/idea has an object being acted upon, and a subject doing the action. Everything about the ad places the woman as the object and not the subject:
She is led into the room by her child, with her eyes closed. We immediately understand that she is a wife and mother; we know nothing about her or her identity outside her relation to her family.
She nervously begins to document her Peloton journey through a series of videos, further casting her as the object of the ad—the viewer does not see through her eyes or even their own, but sees her the way her husband will view the vlog in the end.
Her big moment of triumph isn’t reaching any personal milestones, but her glee over being noticed by an instructor. Again, here the instructor was the subject remarking on her as the object (“He said my name”).
Tal Bachman’s She’s so High (Above Me) plays in the background— the song is not about a woman, but a woman’s place relative to the singer.
Our newly fit Pelotonette’s telling closing remarks: “A year ago, I didn’t realize how much this would change me” (emphasis added).
It’s helpful to juxtapose the Peloton ad with a more skillfully executed one: Nike’s Dream Crazier campaign. This ad begins with portrayals of emotional female athletes, with language deliberately leaning to woman-as-object in the beginning as it describes how others assess and label them. The narration begins over images of women in the throes of powerful, righteous, active emotions like anger, attack, indignation. There’s no meek passivity or nervousness. The commentary continues with an unrelenting list of insults commonly levied at powerful women, and the images slowly shift from emotional to complete and total control—women at the peak of athleticism. The sense of something wrong becomes more tangible and obvious; something is wrong because what is being said doesn’t feel like it matches up with the images. It’s here that the narrator switches to the woman as subject, with lines like “A woman boxing was crazy. A woman dunking, crazy. Coaching an NBA team, crazy.” The women in each of these final images is the actor, not the acted upon, the deliberate discordance turns out to be melody, and the result is an incredibly empowering, inspiring message.
Each ad is about women pushing themselves; each shows women achieving, yet one is demeaning and one is insulting because one places women as the object while the other sets them up as the subject.
Want to avoid being sexist? Start casting women as subjects who act, not objects who are acted upon. Make the ad—in fact, make all your content about what the user is feeling, thinking, and wanting. This is the heart of UX writing and what brands often get wrong. You see, your consumer really doesn’t care about your product. Don’t build your content around your need to be in consumer’s lives. Instead, uncover what your customer wants, what frustrates them, and what they need to make their lives better—then develop content that speaks to those needs.
Bonus points for applying this to how you relate to the people in your real life, too. Imagine if the husband in this ad’s primary need was to buy his wife something that would make her happy? Instead, it appears what he really wanted was to buy her something she would be grateful for. And those, dear readers, are not the same things.