Leveraging the January fitness craze spurred on by festive overindulgence and countless New Year resolutions, an outdoor campaign UK gym brand Gymbox (astonishingly) promoting its exercise classes by comparing them to sexual harassment in the workplace.
Gymbox, which owns 11 gyms in London, sought to sign-up new memberships – with a focus on targeting women – through a January billboard campaign across the UK capital.
The copy-led poster includes the tagline: “Sleazy Boss – Gymbox – Muay Thai – #Knee_To”.
The latter hashtag phrase seemingly referencing the #MeToo movement.
Are you kidding me? Gymbox advertising themselves by saying if you get sexually harassed at work… go work out pic.twitter.com/wwZuLvYYrD
— Moya Lothian-Mclean (@mlothianmclean) January 9, 2020
Other reasons to join Gymbox cited by the poster campaign, which was created in-house, include encouraging kids who are bullied to learn how to box in order to gain respect and for men with a fetish for women’s clothes but find nothing fits to get into shape.
Comment:
This is clearly an attempt to use controversial humour to spread the campaign – but is the old ‘all publicity is good publicity’ still true in such cases?
We’d argue not.
Surely, however humorous the copy writer thinks the message is, workplace sexual harassment is not an appropriate topic for marketing or to drive gym membership?
No wonder the poster comes in the brand’s signature yellow and black colour palette: there is indeed danger here and our advice is to stay away.
Workplace harassment is an extremely serious issue and capitalising on the cultural impact of #MeToo by trivialising it seems an appallingly misguided tactic.
Like other in-your-face challenger brands such as Paddy Power, Gymbox has something of a history of deliberately controversial advertising.
In 2009 it was widely criticised and investigated by the UK Advertising Standards Authority for its ads promoting boxing classes which carried the copy lines “Beat up Chavs. Why hone your skills on punch bags and planks of wood when you can deck some Chavs.”
Amongst its other recent campaigns seeking to generate attention through controversy include its 2018 BDSM sexually influenced ’50 Shades Of Gymbox’ (see case study), while its January 2019 campaign included drug references to suggest that working out was as much fun as going out (see case studies).
It may well find itself in front of the ASA again in the near future.
Links:
Gymbox
http://gymbox.com/blog/50-shades-of-gymbox
https://www.instagram.com/gymboxofficial/
https://twitter.com/GYMBOXofficial
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