Dress Code and corporate image

Employee appearance has assume lesser importance because of decreasing face-to-face contact with clients. The advent of technology has brought about internet, e-mail, social network communication with the client. The deals can now be concluded on the click of a button. However, there are still remaining organizations which survive through face-to-face contact communication. Just to mention the few, such as  banks, sales businesses, and other, require appropriate appearance to clients. Now the question that needs to be answered is: what was the purpose of appropriate dress code in the first place? The obvious answer is: to appear presentable in front of the client. A deeper analysis of the answer one could decern the following: (1) corporate image enhancement, (2) trustworthness of company representative, and (3) willingness to win a profitable deal and sustain it.

An organizational representative is constrained by the level of a client to wear in a certain way in order to enhance the image of what he/she represents. An image enhancement may either for real corporate image or image of what a business should be all about. The real corporate image is a status of an organization created by past and present high opinion and its corporate structure and buildings. An enhancement of image may also resulted on trying to portray what a client expects in order to conclude a deal. A dress code is not only revealing what an organization could do with regard to the client expectation, it also says a lot about a representative as well. A client may trust or distrust a whole organization because of a represenative he/she is dealing with. A representative may change a way he/she dresses because he/she wants to win a deal and make profit. If there is no profit involved, it is highly possible for a representative not to drastically change the way he/she dresses.