Why Power Balance® is like apartheid

It’s happened twice this weekend: once on Friday among the black-pants-and-blue-shirt-set at The Baron on Fredman Drive, once at the Ciao Baby Cucina in Cedar Square. That’s where I saw young men wearing Power Balance wristbands. You have to admire their persistence and their bravery, because they might as well be walking around wearing twinkling neon signs that read “I’m a doos who hasn’t been following the news and haven’t a clue this thing doesn’t actually work”, although that’s quite a lot to fit on a sign, so perhaps it would read “I’m a doos” for short.

Remember those funny rubber straps that looked like watches but weren’t? Every second chino-wearing, Highveld-listening male could be seen wearing one. I first noticed them because somebody at the agency — one of the dudes in digital, I think — started hawking them around to his colleagues at a special discount price. Soon enough I started to see men everywhere wearing them, along with the yellow Lance Armstrong band and the copper bracelet and the beads and who knows how many other wrist-related paraphernalia; any minute now, it seemed, South African men were going to start resembling Ndebele matrons.

After I noticed a couple of tweets, including the Twitter profile of someone who marketed them, I clicked through to the website to have a look-see. “Power Balance® holograms are designed to work with your body’s natural energy field,” said the home page. Apparently they improve balance and flexibility by tuning into your, like, vibrations and stuff. Sportsmen and women were offering testimonials, so obviously this was for real. Hmm, I thought. I noticed that investing in one of these was fairly pricey, between R200 and R500. Given their evident popularity, I nominated them in a piece for the Sunday Times as one of my top 10 gadgets of 2010, because anything that is small and expensive and Does Something (and is bought by men) qualifies as a gadget in my view.

Then all of a sudden the bottom fell out of the Power Balance market. The Australians cited them for false advertising, and they were forced to admit — shock, horror — that there was no credible scientific proof that they worked. That anybody with a rudimentary grasp of Std 6 science could have told you the same thing was apparently beside the point. (Interestingly, a simple search reveals that sceptic websites were questioning the bracelets in as early as February last year, while the notion that they were a scam only gained wide currency several months later.)

The Power Balance debacle is a fascinating case study of the life and death of a fad that drew its inspiration from the same cultural framework that has given the world healing crystals and homeopathy — I suspect that Fritjof Capra’s work, which made quantum physics accessible to the hippie crowd, is at the root of the balancing holograms — but somehow went mainstream in a rather aggressively okish way. New Age for people who watch rugby and ride quad bikes, if you will (Power Balance bands were always very north of the shooter curtain).

The marketing was exceptionally clever, because the distributors knew that awareness on its own wasn’t good enough, guys needed to see their friends wearing them. Also, the endorsement of sportsmen like Ronaldo helped a lot. If that oke wears them, then they must work, right? In the end, they were a marketing phenomenon that got found out as quickly as they took off. Somebody got rich conning the public and I say good for them, because anybody who bought into this kak thoroughly deserved to be parted from their Rondts.

If this scam is especially delicious it’s because it got people who wouldn’t dream of wearing tie-dye anything to believe in phenomena that they would normally dismiss. In a way, Power Balance wristbands were the equivalent of muthi for the Tuscan cluster/ BMW 3 series set.

The shift in public opinion has been dramatic. Products like this, where their efficacy is not immediately apparent, need social approval to be successful. In order for belief to be sustained, it must be endorsed by others. When everybody believed in Power Balance holograms, it was cool to be seen wearing them. All your friends sported one, so you did too. This is clearly no longer the case. When I posed the question, “What do you think when you see someone wearing a Power Balance bracelet?” on Facebook and Twitter, I got a range of responses, including “naïve idiot”, “knob”, “dumbass”, “sucker”, “fule” and a couple of other descriptions which are probably best not repeated here.

This is why the sight of somebody who still wears their funny rubber strap that looks a bit like a watch, but isn’t, is something to be treasured. These days, finding somebody who believed in the efficacy of Power Balance wristbands is like finding someone who supported apartheid. I wonder how many people keep one in their bottom drawer or at the back of their cupboards, a silent but telling testament to their gullibility.

Then again, I suppose we all hoard the embarrassing detritus of fads we once bought into. None so embarrassing, though, as the notion that a silicon band containing a hologram could improve your flexibility. Come to think of it, that must have been a useful side effect: when it came to being taken by this bunch of con artists, a lot of guys did bend over quite far, after all.