life as seen by Millward Brown

[baratron]

As some of you may know, I work for a market research company. I'm not amazingly convinced of the value of some of the surveys we conduct, but I do find interesting clumps of answers. I'd often like to tell people about them, but I'm worried about giving out information That Could Bias The Study. So I generally just discuss them with people at work.

But yesterday I was working on a one-off study about women's clothing. We were asking women and teenage girls what made them choose to buy the clothing they do. Everyone I spoke to mentioned the colour and fabric, and things like how well-made it was - but no one mentioned comfort at all. Now, I know I'm a geek and I have an engineer's approach to clothes - i.e. if my clothes keep me warm and dry and stop people shrieking at me in the street, then they have done their job - but I was very surprised by this. There are two possible conclusions that I can think of. Either:
a) all of the women I spoke to were the right shape and size that they could buy from any women's fashion store and have the clothes be comfortable
or
b) the women I spoke to have been buying clothes from women's fashion stores for so long that they've forgotten that clothes are supposed to be comfortable

I suspect the latter.