Striving for product and customer service excellence yet ignoring dress standards? It’s an expensive mistake.

We spend years building a positive business reputation, ensuring product standards are at the highest level, that branding is consistent, packaging is sharp and on point, advertising and sales pitches align to messaging.

Organisations invest time and money creating, measuring, reporting and driving service standards to ensure the customer experience rates highly. Yet what consideration is given to the impression your team presents internally, and more importantly, to customers? Does your dress standard uphold the standards demanded elsewhere within your organisation?

Dress standards should be included in your brand consistency conversations, after all, your people are integral to the positive relationship customers will have with your organisation and your brand.

Brand consistency impacts your ability to achieve profitable growth. In fact, a recent study on brand consistency, aptly named ‘The Brand Consistency Benchmark Report’, reported that conflicting brand usage accounts for 56% damage to brand credibility making it nearly 30% harder to compete in the market. In contrast, on average, revenue increases attributed to always presenting brand consistency was 23%. Your people represent your brand, therefore people, and the presentation of people, should be included in this measurement.

Do you want to make it harder to compete in your market, or drive revenue growth?

Establishing a dress standard is one of the steps to achieving consistency in the way your people are perceived in the market. Whilst the dress standard sets the tone, it is often difficult to administer without the addition of coordinated workday apparel. To truly achieve brand consistency, you must also control what and how your people present themselves.

This does not mean you must completely dress your people from head to toe, although this is ideal where the budget allows. Provisioning a number of well-chosen garments branded with your logo to your people, enhances the connection your people have to your brand, and presents them in alignment with your brand and your external messaging.