Fashion and Clothing

The marketing messages of fashion have to work on so many levels, as trends and influences filter down from the catwalk into our high-streets and wardrobes. Consumers are influenced by multiple factors from celebrity endorsement, price and promotions, perceptions of tribe and who they are as a person and simple practicality.  Few people don’t enjoy choosing clothes, whether we define shopping as a hobby or pastime or just enjoy treating ourselves to something new. Although we have specifically recruited shoppers who are completely unengaged on occasion in the past, who approach the whole exercise in uniquely specific ways…

Generally though Saros research participants love to talk about choosing clothes and shops, and to visit them too – we recruit hundreds of accompanied shopping trips and consumer safaris in shopping malls across the UK, as well as ‘virtual shopalongs’ exploring online portals, in addition to focus groups and depth interviews. People say that the high street is becoming more and more uniform, with the same shops on every street corner, but consumers are becoming more diverse as new retail experiences open up to them, on and offline.

Alongside the big familiar brands, it is the more niche collections and labels that are doing some of the most interesting research it seems to us, catering to tightly-defined markets with particular needs or interests. We can help you define and explore the motivations of your typical consumer, and elicit spontaneous feedback leading to actionable insight from carefully-chosen recruits.

Whether you need Primark or Prada, we’ll design a screening process to find the right people for your project.  Carefully obscuring brands, designing appropriate validation processes, and managing richly-probing pre-tasks are amongst the many ways Saros can help you get to the heard of your real shoppers, whether they are passionate brand loyalists and advocates or repertoire recreational consumers who are driven by cost, opportunity or practicality.

If you are planning fashion or clothing research in the UK, talk to Saros about recruiting the right research participants for your project, whoever you need for any methodology.