T-minus 1 week until me and the “Denim Divas” get together to talk about all things jeans. Time to go into what I call “Pre-Game.”
Pre-game is never the same. Sometimes, it’s about plowing through stacks and stacks of quantitative data, trying to pick out the factoids that somehow made you go “Hmmmm. That could be an interesting topic to explore.” Other times, it’s simply just doing that last minute fire check with the rest of the team, ensuring that everyone is on the same page as to what we’re really trying to get at.
Preparing for my sit down with these ladies, I found myself needing to do something they didn’t teach me in business school, nor will you find it in the pages of any consumer-marketing textbook. For our purposes, let’s call this technique “Window-Shopping.”
Let me be clear, this is not the kind of window-shopping the tourists do up and down Broadway or Main St. On the surface it seemed harmless enough: Hang out in the ladies denim department of a few local department stores to see and hear first hand, what fuller figure women go through trying to find a pair of jeans that fit just the way they want.
In the military they call it Reconnaissance, observing the subject in their surroundings, to pinpoint their behavior and areas of opportunity. In New York (and especially in a few unnamed department stores), they call it an escort out of the store by security.
Before I became acquainted with a few of the finest security guards in the city, I did pick up a few valuable bits of information and I’m interested to see where they factor-in.
In no specific order, here’s what I noticed:
- Jeans aren’t a grab and go item. You’re gonna be there for a while.
- You’ve got a better chance of predicting the lottery numbers than trying to predict your size in two different brands of jeans.
- The slimmer the fit, the slimmer your wallet becomes once you purchase.
- There are at least 15 different ways of describing the color “blue”.
- If they came out with a style of jeans called “really comfortable” I guarantee they’d fly off the shelf.
…Oh and one last thing: Men do not belong in the women’s jeans department!
Still more to come…
Doug Zarkin
SVP Strategy
Tweet this | Tags: demin, focus group, jeans, women
