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.

Comments

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

I suspect people take comfort as read even if they find it difficult to find comfortable clothes, just because if a clothes isn't comfortable they don't buy it.

If you'd asked me and I answered with regard to my current outfit, I'd have said colour and durability - durability being a function of fitting right so the jeans don't rub. If you'd asked me about shoes, I'd have said comfort, though.

Thing about it though, half my work clothes are castoffs from David - goodness knows how you'd have coded that!