The people inside a product can create extraordinary joy and loyalty. They can also break something no corporate statement can fully repair.
In The Joy Dividend, I wrote that "Peloton’s loyalty runs so deep that canceling isn’t just giving up a bike or treadmill; it feels like leaving your team."
But what happens when the team leaves you?
Recently, Jewish and Israeli Peloton members raised concerns about instructors sharing or interacting with social-media content they experienced as anti-Israeli or antisemitic.
In a Reddit discussion among Jewish Peloton members, nobody was complaining about pricing, class libraries or product performance.
One longtime member described the instructors as “a huge part of my life.” Discovering certain activity by a favorite instructor, she wrote, would leave her “devastated.” Another said it would “break my heart.”
Nobody talks about an interchangeable brand this way. That vocabulary belongs to relationships. And it is the business model working precisely as designed.
When intimacy becomes the product
Peloton instructors do considerably more than demonstrate movement.
They enter people’s homes repeatedly. They look directly into the camera. They talk about their relationships, setbacks and insecurities. They mark milestones. They show up during the ten seconds when someone is deciding whether to trust herself with the next 45 minutes.
The member knows the instructor’s voice, humor, music, catchphrases and history. Meanwhile, the instructor has no idea who the member is.
Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl named this phenomenon in 1956. They called it “intimacy at a distance”: the sense of face-to-face closeness audiences can develop with media figures who do not know them.
Nearly half a century later, Eminem gave the phenomenon its darkest cultural expression in “Stan.” The song tells the story of a fan who constructs an intimate relationship with an artist who does not know him—and experiences the absence of reciprocity as rejection. The character became so culturally powerful that stan entered everyday language as a term for an intensely devoted fan.
Most parasocial relationships are nothing like Stan’s obsession. But the song captured their central asymmetry perfectly:
One person experiences a relationship. The other experiences an audience.
What began as a description of television audiences—and later became the premise of a hit song—has now become a product specification.
Peloton did not stumble into this. In April 2026, the company launched a campaign celebrating what it called the “joy of movement.” Its CMO described movement with Peloton not simply as exercise, but as a source of personal freedom and joy.
The relationship is one-sided. The emotion isn’t.
We tend to treat parasocial attachment as embarrassing: a slightly pathetic imitation of a real relationship.
The evidence is less dismissive.
In a 2024 study involving more than 3,000 participants, people perceived strong parasocial relationships as better at fulfilling emotional needs than weak real-life relationships, though not as effective as close reciprocal ones.
The relationship may be one-sided. But the emotional effect is not imaginary.
Familiar media figures can provide comfort, encouragement, stability and companionship. They are reliably present. They arrive when invited. Over time, their voices become embedded in the structure of our days.
Peloton adds a layer television never had: physical vulnerability. Members meet their instructors while exhausted, sweating and negotiating with themselves about stopping. The voice that carries someone through that moment becomes associated with her own strength ("You Get To!" "it's tough, but you're tougher!")
A study of 1,036 Peloton users examined the roles of instructor attachment and community belonging in members’ experiences of personal growth. It was a convenience sample and cannot establish causation, but it puts structure around what members already describe: the experience can feel less like content delivered through a screen and more like a relationship held inside a community.
That is the parasocial dividend. It helps people return, resist cheaper alternatives and transform a solitary activity into a shared ritual. It makes a familiar face part of the value proposition.
The reaction isn’t proportional to the click
Here comes the harder half: the one brands would rather not book.
Companies want personality when it drives engagement. They want authenticity when it builds trust. They want intimate stories when those stories generate loyalty.
Then the same person posts something outside an official brand channel, and the activity is abruptly reclassified as personal, private and unrelated to the brand.
That distinction may hold contractually. It does not hold emotionally.
If a person’s humanity is part of the product when it creates attachment, it cannot suddenly become irrelevant when it creates risk.
A like, follow or repost is a tiny digital act. But the emotional response is not proportional to the click. It is proportional to everything that came before it.
The member remembers every difficult ride. Every morning that voice got her out of bed. Every message about courage, inclusion and belonging. And she may ask, am I excluded from this conversation?...
The shield and the threat are the same person
Research suggests that parasocial bonds can act as “brand shields.” A relationship with a celebrity can preserve trust and encourage forgiveness when the associated brand transgresses.
But here, the perceived source of the injury is not separate from the emotional asset protecting the company.
The shield and the threat are the same person.
The relationship is also a two-way conductor. In an experimental study of influencer and brand betrayal, perceived betrayal by an influencer damaged attitudes, trust and purchase intentions toward the associated brand. Betrayal by the brand also weakened the audience’s relationship with the influencer.
Whatever the relationship carries in, it can carry out. The joy travels across the connection. So does the hurt.
Warmth may raise the stakes further. In the classic study “When Good Brands Do Bad,” relationships with brands positioned as sincere suffered much more after a transgression than relationships with brands positioned around excitement.
The finding sounds counterintuitive until we recognize the contract underneath it.
We do not expect warmth from every company. But when a brand offers support, safety and belonging, we evaluate its behavior against something closer to the standards of friendship.
The emotional promise raises the emotional standard.
As brands become more human, their humans become more consequential
This is not only a Peloton problem.
Founders narrate their lives online until buying their products feels like supporting someone we know. Podcast hosts become indistinguishable from the media companies behind them. Financial educators give banks a human voice. Beauty advisors, fitness coaches and creators turn corporate platforms into familiar faces.
Soon, AI companions may remember our fears, notice our moods and speak to us with more apparent patience than many people in our lives.
As brands become more human, their humans become more consequential.
A spokesperson generates awareness.
A parasocial figure generates a perceived relationship.
Those are not the same asset, and they do not carry the same risk.
There is no clean corporate move
Peloton has demonstrated that it will act when a controversial figure is separable from the product.
Following Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks, Peloton indefinitely paused the use of his music, stopped recommending classes that featured it and later removed hundreds of affected classes from its library.
After footage surfaced showing Sean “Diddy” Combs assaulting Cassie Ventura, the company paused his music and removed its Bad Boy Entertainment Artist Series.
More recently, Peloton’s campaign featuring Hudson Williams we mentioned above disappeared after an old photograph resurfaced showing a swastika drawn on his face. Peloton reportedly maintained that the campaign had reached its contractually agreed-upon end, making that example suggestive rather than conclusive.
In each situation, however, the person was an external cultural figure whose contribution could be separated from Peloton itself: a song, an artist series, a finite campaign.
The instructors are different. Peloton spent years making them inseparable from the experience.
That fusion was not a mistake. It is one of the reasons the brand transcended the equipment it sells.
Peloton may be able to acknowledge the injury, examine whether its standards were breached and give members more control over which instructors appear in their experience.
What it cannot do is restore the innocence of the relationship.
Once a member knows, she cannot unknow.
A corporate statement cannot necessarily reach the place where the ritual broke.
The stress enters through the same channel that delivered the joy
This is the real cost brands inherit when they build loyalty through human intimacy.
They do not merely become vulnerable to bad publicity. They become vulnerable to betrayal.The same voice that once made a person feel stronger can now make her tense. The same face that signaled safety can become a source of vigilance.
The stress enters through the exact channel that delivered the joy. The ritual that once reduced stress begins to produce vigilance.
This is more than reputational damage. It is emotional value compounding in reverse.
It also exposes a blind spot in how brands design for joy. Companies carefully map the moments, features and experiences that produce positive emotion. They are less likely to map the people through whom that emotion is delivered.
But every brand building loyalty through human connection should be asking:
- Who carries our emotional promise?
- What expectations does that relationship create?
- What happens when the person delivering belonging becomes a source of exclusion?
- How much control do customers have over who enters their experience?
- And what would meaningful repair require if the relationship breaks?
This is not an argument for policing every opinion held by every public-facing employee. It is an argument for recognizing that, once a person becomes part of the emotional experience, her conduct can change the performance of the product -- even when no feature, class or piece of equipment has changed.
Peloton may still perform its functional job perfectly. But the product is also performing an emotional job: help me feel motivated, supported and part of something.
When the experience begins to create tension, vigilance or exclusion instead, the brand has not encountered only a communications problem. It is failing at one of the jobs that made it valuable.
That is the larger lesson of the parasocial dividend.
The answer is not for brands to become less human. Human connection is where much of their joy—and much of their competitive value—lives.
But brands must treat the people who create that value as part of the customer experience, not merely as talent surrounding it.
Because once belonging becomes part of the product, exclusion becomes a product failure.
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Hamutal (Tula) Schieber is a researcher, writer, speaker, and Peloton user (TBD). www.thejoydividend.com | www.researchci.com
Originally published in The Joy Dividend on LinkedIn.