Academics do great research – but draw sloppy conclusions

Is there any evidence consumers are becoming more or less interested in how ethically garments are made? Some academics and journalists think there is – but the conclusions wouldn’t convince the most inexperienced of retail buyers

One apparently interesting piece of  newish research from MIT  in 38 Banana Republic outlet stores in the US  seemed to show 14% uptake in more expensive priced garments if they’ve got an ethically reassuring message. But no retailer would accept their conclusions – and it’s disappointing that a major university gives its mark of approval to an argument a junior deputy buyer would see through right away.

The research compared organic T shirts with a point of sale poster  flagging a meaningless message (“The Island Wash organic T shirt”)  shirts with a poster carrying a message that meant something  (“The Island Wash T shirt means fair working conditions”). Both carried the same premium price, but sales of the shirts with the meaningful message were 14% higher. At much lower price points, the meaningful message got no extra sales. From which the researchers conclude there is “a substantial segment of shoppers willing to support fair labor standards by voting with their shopping dollar”.

There may be. But the research doesn’t demonstrate that.

The report of this research is 26 pages long, and there’s almost as many Greek letters in it as in my copy of Liddell & Scott’s Greek Lexicon. But no long mathematical formulae, or four pages of bibliography, make up for rotten logic.

The researchers didn’t investigate whether they would have got exactly the same response from ANY meaningful message (like “guarantees a better sex life”; “adds a year to your life”; “knocks 2% off the time it takes to dry”; “takes up less space in a suitcase” – or even “no money wasted on excessive wages for foreign workers who don’t need them anyway”). Retailers know that there’s usually a segment of buyers concerned only with price (which is why MIT found that no promotional message shifted sales of very low priced clothes) and other segments easily aroused by any interesting claim. That’s why so much advertising is full of product benefits few of us really understand (“causes 12.3% less abrasion than other toothpastes”), but sort of think must be a Good Thing.

Worse, the report reads as if the researchers have made a profound logical fallacy. They’re very excited that consumers responded to the message when it promoted a more expensive garment, but not when it promoted cheaper one. Which they appear (and I may be doing them a disservice here, because the conclusions really are sloppily worded) to believe shows there’s a definable segment of customers who’ll pay a premium for an “ethically produced” garment.  

That’s simply an error of logic. At best, the research might show that a proportion of premium price shoppers have ethical interests – but there’s nothing in the research showing they’ll pay for ethics, but not for better fit, comfier fabric or extended credit.

The research demonstrates a basic truth about why brands do better with meaningful messages – but we all learn that in day one in any marketing job. There’s no lesson in it, though, about consumer attitudes to transparent sourcing.

Only most bad “research” into retail merchandising doesn’t get published by posh universities, or referred to by once serious newspapers as if it meant something Most such “research” might make into a student dissertation at the University of South Bronx and get a polite comment for effort. Because this one coincides with the prejudices of most academics and all NYT journalists (you can’t work for the NYT unless you agree in writing that Walmart’s an agent of the devil), it’s given a status the poor sap at the university of the South Bronx will never get.

I believe there’s a quite different lesson.

Try as I might, I can’t find a single recent piece of academic research supporting politically unpopular (n the academic community) positions about the apparel trade. Like “foreign-owned factories pay more than locally owned ones”. Or “Few customers really care about ethical trading”. Or “factory workers in poor countries earn a great deal more, even after paying extortionate rents, than they made back home in their village”.

Supporting capitalism probably doesn’t make you popular in academe: it certainly doesn’t get you quoted in high-circulation newspapers or websites. And, however objective academe tries to be, it’s always going to reflect the biases of other academics.

Over the past year or so, there’s been a torrent of academic research in to the global apparel trade. As I’ll be showing over the next few weeks, much of it is a great deal less reliable than its authors think.

Which is a pity. We need real data about this industry: and elementary logical errors, of the sort MIT is allowing through its “peer review” net, prevent us from having it.

The authors of all this research might be right. But doing bad research is a lousy way of seeking the truth.