eCommerce Marketing: How We Misread the Internet Audience

By now the Internet has chewed up and masticated the infamous Peloton exercise bike ad. For you people in the future visiting to soberly learn the lessons from the Ghosts of Christmas Ads Past, here’s what that was all about:

The Internet reaction to this ad is a textbook case of unexpected backlash

Everybody mocked it. And lest you be tempted to think “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” Peloton’s stock actually fell 10% due to bad press from the ad.

The parodies were scathing. This one got the best applause:

Far superior to slick efforts like Funny or Die:

What went wrong with the Peloton ad? An analysis

The first mistake in this marketing campaign was holding up outdated sexual roles to modern audiences. People criticized the ad for its sexist message: A husband appears to think that his wife, already in great shape, isn’t fit enough for him, so he gets her this stationary bike.

Next, the tone of this ad is campy with unintentional horror. It’s bad enough that the doe-eyed female lead comes off as a doormat, submissive cringing arm candy who will sacrifice anything to keep her domineering husband happy. But she even says she’s “nervous” at one point. Nervous about what? Is she going to be beaten, divorced, and abandoned if she doesn’t lose those crucial five ounces of leftover baby fat?

The fact that she’s less than enthusiastic in one scene in bed, but vents quietly to herself, even suggests that she’s secretly disgusted with her life, while putting on a big cheery show for her hubs. Did he MAKE her record her exercise regimen?

Insult to injury: The same actress gets hired for an alcohol ad in response, where it’s implied that she’s having a night out on the town drinking with her girlfriends after presumably having helped her leave the big jerk.

Or maybe they killed him and left him and the bike buried in that ridiculously scenic backyard they have.

There’s a second layer to the Peloton ad’s mistakes: It’s made for upper class white folk only. The average person just can’t afford that huge showy house and lifestyle, not to mention pricey home exercise equipment which most people end up turning into an expensive coat rack. The mixture of impossible perfection in the spotless home together with the household of rural goobers who can’t think of anything better to do with their time just puts another wall between this ad and the public.

How I would have done it differently:

Believe it or not, people just like your humble author could have been the perfect market for this product. Leaving out the buttinski spouse factor, many of us are concerned for our health and want to improve. My own doctor, after listening with wonder at my enthusiasm for the Mediterranean diet and my fanatic avoidance of sugar, told me that there’s nothing left to improve about my eating habits and the only way to take further weight off is exercise. Good ol’ calorie-burning cardio.

Nobody should be shown already in great shape being forced to exercise because bossy husband says so. This is what people motivating themselves to get fit do on the Internet. Or things like this:

People document whole fitness journeys online in social media now, and they’re not doing it to please their spouse or boss or God himself. And this is the Internet’s collective attitude towards motivation:

motivational quote

How hard is it to capture this attitude when you’re selling fitness equipment? I’m about to sound like an episode of Mad Men here (which is kind of the point anyway), but I’ll trust you’ve all got the gist of it by now.

The takeaway I wish every client knew:

In my freelance work, I end up doing a lot of eCommerce marketing. My job is usually the task of putting a human face and personality onto an online business, talking to that Internet audience in a way that needs to connect with them.

Folks, when you hire a content marketer, LISTEN TO THEM! We make it our business to stay on top of social media, keep abreast of modern attitudes, analyze our market to see what trends they’re heading for next, and pay attention to their likes and dislikes.

When we say market A will like meme B, we know what we’re talking about. When we say celebrity A is about as popular with market demographic B as canned polio, we know what we’re talking about. When we’re trying to explain that this outdated value from Generation A will turn off generation B, trust us, we did the math!

It’s insights like this that make me say “you overthink SEO,” because you miss these critical friction points when you focus on writing for machines instead of people.

 

Author: Penguin Pete

Take good care of my memes; I've raised them since they were daydreams!