🍭 Your Customer’s “Why” Doesn’t Matter...Here’s What Does

I accidentally almost got cancelled on Twitter this week… and, in the strangest twist of fate, I’m kind of thrilled about it. 😅 It all started with this tweet:

When I posted it, I genuinely didn’t think I was lobbing a grenade into my timeline. It was just a half-formed idea I’ve been circling lately, one of those “let me toss this thought into the void and see if anyone else has been wondering the same thing” moments.

But apparently the void doesn’t like being challenged. 😅

People came out of the freaking digital underbrush to inform me that I was not just wrong, but profoundly, cosmically, “are you sure you’re getting enough sunlight?” wrong. And the funniest part is that most of these opinions didn’t show up publicly. Instead, they tiptoed into my DMs.

I love the discourse, and it’s been fascinating debating this topic with people…but there was one message stopped me cold.

Not because it was harsh, but because it came from a close friend whose brain I highly respect. They said:

And that’s when I started really looking at this idea much closer…

Because if something makes me pause long enough to second-guess myself, it usually means there’s something to this idea that might be worth exploring further.

So I sat with it.
And the questions rolled in:

“Is there actually a difference?”
“Am I contradicting my own work?”
“Are we supposed to be hunting day and night for this singular, glowing true north star…the one perfect root cause that explains why people buy what they’ll buy next?”

Or… is the entire premise built on a myth? 😨

The more I replayed every insight project, every survey, every transcript, every pixel of customer behavior I’ve analyzed over the past 10+ years, the more I realized something embarrassing, and also kind of liberating:

I think we spend way too much time trying to find ONE right reason people buy, which tricks us into believing there has to be a “right” answer buried somewhere beneath the consumer psyche…if only we could dig deep enough or analyze hard enough to uncover it.

In reality, the “right reason” behaves less like a universal truth and more like a mood ring…

It shifts.
It mutates.
It dissolves the minute the emotional weather changes.
It refuses to sit still long enough to be the North Star we wish it were.

After pondering this, I finally admitted to myself something both hilarious and tragic:

The brands that cling the hardest to their “One True Why” are the ones who get blindsided the fastest when the emotional climate flips.

Which brings me to the most dramatic, expensive, beautifully public example we’ve ever been gifted of this exact phenomenon:

Peloton.

A $40B masterclass in how a beloved, poetic “Why” can look, feel, and act so sacred… right up until the moment it evaporates.

Peloton: The $40B Collapse That Started With One Wrong “Why”

Peloton is the perfect case study for this exact thought problem because they really, truly believed they had found their customers true north — the pure, crystalline core “Why” behind why people buy fitness equipment.

Their “Why” was almost mythological:

People buy Peloton because they want transformation, discipline, and community.

It’s a beautiful thought, really. A noble cause. The marketing equivalent of a bedtime story whispered to anxious strategists everywhere.

(It’s also one of the most common “Why’s” I see across every brand, in every industry, and every product…from toothpaste tablets to weight loss supplements. But that’s another story…)

For a while, the numbers made it look undeniably true.

During the pandemic years, Peloton’s growth looked supernatural: annual revenue shot up to ≈ $4 billion, demand skyrocketed, and their instructors basically became minor celebrities with cultish devotion.

In certain quarters, revenue was up triple digits year-over-year, making it feel like Peloton had tapped into a universal human motive that transcended all other motives.

If you charted the data, it looked like a huge success story born out of a bad situation (we’re looking at you Covid). If you listened to their instructors, it sounded like one too.

The “Why” seemed carved into stone.

But then the world reopened. Slowly, awkwardly, with people blinking into daylight like bears climbing out of a den, the world came back online. And everything Peloton believed about its “Why” evaporated on contact with reality:

• Revenue slipped from ≈ $4.0B → ≈ $3.6B the very next year

• Their hardware business collapsed roughly 42% year-over-year in key quarters

• Expenses ballooned faster than demand

• Warehouses filled with unsold bikes (the now-famous inventory glut)

• Stock cratered over 80% from its peak

• Leadership changes followed, including the CEO stepping down

None of this happened because Peloton suddenly became less inspiring, less community-oriented, or less transformative. Their instructors were still motivating. Their products were still top-notch. Their message of “becoming the best you” stayed consistent.

This massive shift in growth didn’t happen because of something Peloton did…it happened because the emotional weather changed.

The context window that made their “Why” look universal suddenly closed — and when it did, the “Why” that once felt sacred revealed itself to be something far less stable:

It was not a core truth or eternal motive. It was just a story that held its shape under very specific psychological conditions.

And when those conditions dissolved… so did the “Why.”

The Part Marketers Hate Because It Breaks Their Favorite Story

Once you strip away the mythology, Peloton’s collapse reveals something most marketers don’t want to face:

There was never a singular “Why” holding everything together in the first place. Not for Peloton, and not for your customers either.

When you zoom into real buyer behavior (not the cleaned-up post-purchase justifications, or the tidy rationalizations people give in interviews) the “Why” doesn’t look like a stable north star. It looks more like a lava lamp having an existential crisis.

Customers don’t run on one motive…they run on mindstates (shoutout to the OG, Will Leach.)

And those mindstates shifts constantly, often for the dumbest, smallest, most human reasons imaginable:

“I’m anxious…better buy something.”
“I’m bored…better buy something.”
“I’m proud of myself…better buy something.”
“I’m feeling guilty…better buy something.”
“I’m out of my depth…better buy something.”
“I’m in need of an easier experience…better buy something.”
“I’m craving sugar…better buy something.”

And here’s the uncomfortable, slightly devastating part for us marketers:

These motives aren’t fixed at all. They rotate on the daily. They mutate week over week. They contradict each other hour to hour.

A customer can go from: “I want to transform my life”
To: “I just want five minutes of peace!!”
To: “Dang, I really want to prove to myself I’m not slipping.”
To: “I also want something that doesn’t make me think too hard…”

with the exact same product in their cart the entire time. 🤯

This is why the hunt for “The One True Why” has always felt strangely unsatisfying to me…because we’re really just trying to pin a stable meaning onto an unstable human whose emotional landscape shifts faster than their screen time report.

And once you see that, you can’t unsee it.

You start realizing the brands most committed to their immaculate, capital-W “Why” are the same brands that get sideswiped the hardest when the emotional climate changes even a few degrees.

Which is why Peloton’s story isn’t a failure of purpose, it’s a failure of psychological realism. They weren’t wrong about transformation being one of the reasons their customers were buying (after all, we had so much time during Covid, why not become the best me I can be?)

What they were wrong about was assuming transformation was the only motive — the fixed motive — the one that mattered across identity states, stress levels, seasons, routines, and context windows…and speaking only about that narrative over long periods of time.

In reality, people were buying Peloton for dozens of micro-motives that only temporarily aligned during one extremely specific moment in time.

And once that moment passed, the illusion of a singular “Why” passed with it.

What Actually Matters (And Why This Isn’t a Cynical Take at All)

Now, it’s probably easy to read everything up to this point and think the lesson is: “Welp, that’s great, Sarah. Humans are chaotic gremlins and we should all give up on marketing ever being easy then...”

But that’s not the point I’m trying to make. The point is much more empowering — and honestly, much bigger than I realized at first.

Think of it this way: once we stop chasing a singular, universal, customer-defined “Why,” you finally unlock the real strategic freedom brands have always had but rarely use:

You get to choose your brand’s “Why.” On purpose. With intention. As a design decision…not an archeological dig.

You don’t have to excavate some mystical, pre-existing motive lurking in your customer’s soul to do this and you don’t have to reverse-engineer a grand purpose from scattered data points. You don’t even have to contort your strategy around whatever your customers happen to be feeling that month.

Customers’ motives will always move.
That’s the rule of the universe.
You cannot build a stable strategy on unstable psychology.

But you can build a stable strategy around your chosen “Why” — the meaning you decide to stand for — as long as the way you express that “Why” adapts to the emotional patterns your customers move through.

Customers don’t need to share your “Why” for your “Why” to matter. Your “Why” is the anchor, their emotions are the weather.

And the genius of great brands isn’t that they “discover” why people buy…it’s that they choose a “Why” strong enough to hold them steady, and match their messaging to the emotional state their customers are in right now.

Not one, all encompassing, customer-driven “Why.” But one, brand-driven, emotional anchor delivered in many flavors.

That’s the difference.

You don’t choose your customer’s motive, but you can choose your brand’s meaning.

And that meaning becomes the thing your customers grow into. It becomes the identity they borrow when they’re tired, or proud, or stressed, or overwhelmed, or craving competence. It becomes the through-line in a life full of shifting states.

Customers don’t need a brand that mirrors their motives.
They need a brand that helps them make sense of their motives.

Once you stop searching for a single buyer Why and start designing from a brand Why — a chosen Why — the entire landscape becomes simpler:

1. You don’t have to predict emotions, you only have to match them.

2. You don’t have to stabilize customer motives, you stabilize your meaning.

3. You don’t have to force a static narrative, you adapt your expressions while keeping your anchor firm.

This right here is exactly why Peloton didn’t die. It’s why they were able to rebuild — not by returning to their original “Why” (namely: transformation, discipline, and community) but by reframing how their internal “Why” expressed itself across different emotional states.

And now we get to talk about the best part of the story…how Peloton fixed it.

How Peloton Rebuilt (Once They Chose Their “Why” Instead of Chasing Ours)

Peloton didn’t rebound because they re-discovered some hidden customer truth, they rebounded because they finally stopped treating their customer’s motive as the foundation — and started treating it as the variable.

Instead of asking:
“Why are people buying Peloton right now?”
(which is a question doomed to change every five minutes…)

They asked:
“What does Peloton mean to people, regardless of why people buy?”

Peloton chose a new “Why,” an internal “Why”:

Movement that fits you right where you are — in any season, routine, identity, or emotional state.

This new narrative…just movement you can actually stick with was something flexible enough to hold:

• the stressed parent,

• the bored twenty-something,

• the proud achiever,

• the post-injury returner,

• the person in a slump,

• the person riding a high,

• and the person who needs one tiny win today because absolutely everything else is went to shit.

Here’s what they changed:

They shifted their core messaging on ads, landing pages, and emails from “change your life” to: “tiny, doable wins you can feel today.”

They expanded from a single fitness identity to an entire ecosystem of emotional (not just practical) personas, modalities, routines, and emotional contexts, each with its own individual ecosystem.

They reframed the bike from a lifestyle altar to a reliable companion.

They diversified the emotional entry points by speaking to competence, calm, pride, ease, routine, autonomy, community — all equally valid, all equally supported.

They stopped forcing one emotional narrative and started matching whichever narrative the customer was in.

And guess what?

Consumers followed the messaging…not the other way around.

• Subscriptions to a multi-use program became the economic engine, making up ≈ 67% of total revenue by Q3 FY25.

• The hardware business continued to drop (down ~27% year-over-year in key quarters), but this no longer spelled doom because the company wasn’t hinging its identity on equipment sales anymore.

• Subscription gross margin sat around 67%+, a beautifully steady, high-margin base that doesn’t panic every time demand hiccups.

• And their connected fitness subscriber count stayed surprisingly resilient at ≈ 2.88 million, even with hardware in a slump — meaning people were staying for the meaning, not the equipment.

Peloton didn’t have to solve human nature, they just had to stop fighting it. Humans are wildly fickle, and oddly flaky at times. 😅 Which also makes them beautiful, interesting, and worth the effort to connect with.

Peloton didn’t rebuild by returning to their original “Why.” They rebuilt by choosing their own “Why” that could survive shifting motives, shifting identities, and shifting seasons of life — a meaning robust enough to outlive any one customer state.

Which brings us to the actual point of all of this — the part that matters for your work, your brand, your offers, and your creative decisions.

The Real Takeaway (And the Big Unlock for Your Brand)

Once you zoom out of the Peloton saga you start to see the shape of a much bigger truth, one that sits at the heart of every high-performing brand:

Your “Why” — the meaning you choose to stand for — becomes the anchor that gives your customers something to hold onto while they move through those flickering states, and this is the part that separates the good marketers from the great ones.

If you want to become the next David Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, or Eugene Schwartz, you need to become an architect of these things…not an archeologist.

Archeologists dig.
Architects design.

Archeologists search for truth.
Architects build something that becomes true.

Your chosen “Why” becomes the place your customers go to interpret their emotional chaos. It becomes the lens through which they understand their own motivations. It becomes the stabilizing meaning in a life full of instability.

Customers don’t need your brand to explain why they buy. They need your brand to make their reasons feel real.

Brands that understand this get to play a completely different game.

Once you choose your “Why” and stop asking customers to hand you theirs, everything gets a whole lot simpler:

• Your messaging becomes adaptive instead of reactive.

• Your positioning becomes magnetic instead of fragile.

• Your testing becomes predictable instead of mystical.

• Your creative finally clicks into emotional resonance instead of chasing it.

• Your team stops arguing over “what people actually want” and starts designing around how people actually feel.

You stop hunting for ghosts in the machine, and you start building systems that work in real life.

This is the work we do inside Tether Skool, week after week, with other founders, media buyers, writers, and strategists who are tired of chasing the “One True Why” and are ready to learn how human behavior actually works in real time.

We don’t talk in abstractions or worship at the altar of “core customer truth.”

Instead, we teach the thing no one taught us: how to read emotional weather:

1. How to map the identity posture your audience is in today, not the one you wish they were in.

2. How to identify whether you’re talking to someone in tension, someone in trust, or someone in pride.

3. How to diagnose cold vs. warm vs. returning states without guessing.

4. How to adapt your messaging so it matches the emotional moment instead of fighting it.

5. How to build a brand “Why” that doesn’t crumble every time your customer’s mood shifts.

It’s not complicated once you see it.
It’s just invisible until you do.

And because so many people asked after last week’s session (and because this framework hits harder when you can actually apply it to your brand) I decided to open a free 7-day trial so you can jump in, binge the trainings, screenshot the frameworks, ask questions in the community, and use the system before you ever commit to anything.

If you’re done chasing the “ghost-Why”…

If you’re ready to build a brand with a deep meaning that holds steady through any emotional climate…

If you want marketing to finally feel easy instead of a giant mess…

👉 Join the free 7-day trial of Tether Skool here.

Come learn the system that works in every season — because it’s built for how people actually behave!

Until next week,

🦕 Sarah

🚨 Dex’s Trend Alert: Watch Parties & The Return of Collective Reality

Searches for “watch party ideas” just spiked more than 10,000% over the past month — a volcanic jump that’s now dwarfing every adjacent entertainment keyword across Pinterest and Google.

At first glance, it looks like people are just planning snacks and seating.
But this spike isn’t about snacks.

It’s about synchronizing reality in a world where everyone lives inside their own little algorithmic bubble.

Watch parties are the closest thing we have to a global campfire.

📈 The Signal: We’re Rebuilding Shared Worlds
Every time watch party searches explode, something deeper is happening underneath:

Billions of people — spread across time zones, languages, and wildly different daily lives — are suddenly trying to feel the same thing at the same time.

That’s rare now.

The internet shattered the monoculture.
But watch parties bring it roaring back in miniature.

Two types of global behavior emerge:

→ The World-Builders — people who create elaborate party setups, curated Pinterest boards, themed food, lighting, playlists. They want to construct a world everyone steps into.
→ The Global Reactors — people who participate through memes, recap videos, group chats, livestreams. They want to experience a feeling in sync with millions.

Different expressions, same need:
Don’t let me feel this moment alone.

🧠 The Diagnosis: Pop Culture Is a Psychological Shortcut
People aren’t gathering around movies, finales, or premieres.
They’re gathering around emotional calibration.

Pop culture gives us:

→ a shared language
→ a shared timeline
→ a shared emotional arc

In other words, it’s the last frictionless way for strangers to connect without needing history, context, or trust.

It’s a cheat code.

A Brazilian teen, a Canadian mom, and an engineer in Singapore can react to the same series twist — instantly understanding each other’s emotion without explanation.

That’s the magic.
Pop culture temporarily unifies people who have nothing in common except a screen.

🧩 The Cultural Function of Watch Parties (Global Edition)

Watch parties aren’t just parties.
They’re cultural tuning forks — they bring people back to a shared frequency.

💬 Why It Works (Scientifically Speaking)
Humans co-regulate emotion.
Watching something together — physically or digitally — aligns:

• attention
• heart rate
• emotional interpretation
• memory formation

That’s why a funny scene is funnier with people.
A scary moment is scarier.
A plot twist feels world-shaking.

The collective amplifies the individual.

Pop culture becomes the container for that amplification — a safe, cheap, low-friction way to feel connected in a fragmented world.

🛍️ How to Use This as a Cheat Code

For DTC Brands
→ Tie your product to shared cultural events; don’t fight the timeline — ride it.
→ Build “watch kits,” “moment bundles,” or “event rituals.”
→ Position products as tools that transform viewers into hosts or reactors.

For Creators & Media Buyers
→ Create real-time brand reactions tied to global drops.
→ Encourage fans to recreate scenes, snacks, or setups.
→ Map content around high-arousal cultural moments (finales, releases, matches).

For Strategists
→ Treat pop culture as infrastructure — not entertainment.
→ Build campaigns that sync with moments the world is already emotionally open.
→ Stop thinking of content as weekly; think of it as event-driven.

When everyone is watching the same thing, the window for persuasion widens.
Attention becomes easier.
Identity becomes malleable.
Emotion becomes shared.

💡 Pro Move: Build Your Brand’s “Shared Moment” Engine
Anchor Moment: Pick a recurring cultural event you can own emotionally.
Global Cue: Tie your message to a universal emotion the event evokes.
Ritual Hook: Give people something simple to replicate and share.
Distribution: Sync campaigns to the cultural calendar — not the business calendar.

If you can tap into a moment where the world is watching together, you skip the hardest part of marketing: warming people up.

TL;DR
Watch parties aren’t entertainment.
They’re global identity chambers.

They turn fragmented audiences into synchronized humans — just long enough to feel like we’re all living in the same story again.

Until next week…

🦖🦃 Dex