Planet Fitness has released a piece of brand content that deliberately avoids the traditional January advertising playbook. Their collaboration with Freshlyground’s new lead singer, Mbali Makhoba, reimagines Etta James’ 1962 classic Something’s Got a Hold on Me as a powerful, locally rooted music video that looks and feels more like movement culture than marketing.
For Planet Fitness, the collaboration was never about launching a campaign in the conventional sense. It was about creating something people would choose to watch, share, and move to, whether or not they were thinking about gyms at all.
‘Brand marketing has shifted,’ said Jenna Rivera, Head of Marketing at Planet Fitness. ‘People aren’t engaging with content because a logo appears on their screen.
They engage when something reflects how they feel, how they move, how they want to live. Our job isn’t to interrupt that. It’s to participate in it.’ The collaboration taps into movement, rhythm, and collective energy. Elements that sit at the heart of both music and training.
By treating the content like a music video first and a brand expression second, Planet Fitness places itself inside culture rather than alongside it. The result is work that stands on its own, without explanation. Rivera explains that this approach is intentional. ‘When content needs to explain itself too much, it’s already losing relevance. We wanted to create something that made sense emotionally before it made sense commercially. If people feel it, if it moves them literally or figuratively, the brand association follows naturally.’
This philosophy reflects a broader shift in brand marketing, where the most effective work no longer centres on products or propositions, but on shared experiences. In this case, the experience is movement as joy rather than obligation, and training as connection rather than correction.
The choice of song plays a critical role. James’ original track is soulful, kinetic, and impossible to sit still to. It carries a legacy that transcends generations, reinforced by its later sampling in Flo Rida’s Good Feeling, with a music video synonymous with momentum and collective uplift. By reworking it through a South African lens, Planet Fitness bridges global cultural memory with local expression. ‘Music already tells a story about how your body wants to move,’ said Rivera. ‘We didn’t need to manufacture that. We needed to honour it, localise it, and let South Africans see themselves in it.’
Importantly, the video doesn’t attempt to define what training should look like. Instead, it shows many interpretations of movement, reinforcing Planet Fitness’s positioning as a community that welcomes different bodies, different energies, and different reasons for showing up.
‘In the wellness industry, authenticity matters,’ Rivera added. ‘If people don’t see themselves reflected, they disengage. Our collab is about celebrating movement in all its forms, not prescribing it. That’s where we want connection to happen.’
PLANET FITNESS
https://www.planetfitness.co.za/
