How corporate clothing can improve brand reputation

Standard corporate attires can look very professional and utilitarian. This can be an advantage in many businesses which require projection of values such as sincerity and excellence. Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

Anyone who’s ever run a business will know that brand reputation is everything. It often takes significant effort to develop your brand’s reputation. After that, you need to apply ongoing care and maintenance to ensure that your brand continues to be viewed positively. Corporate clothing can play an important role in this process.

Here, Ross Crayton, Managing Director at Core Workwear, shares his insight into how corporate clothing can improve brand reputation.

Corporate clothing reflects your brand identity

Building a brand identity is generally a process of repetition. Essentially, the basic process is to keep getting your brand identifiers in front of your target audience. You encourage them to connect those identifiers with your brand and everything associated with it, particularly your values.

The key to this process is consistent repetition. In other words, your target audience needs to receive the same message, in the same way, over and over again until it sinks in. Then you need to keep repeating that message to ensure that it stays alive.

Using corporate clothing is an obvious, effective and cost-effective way of spreading your brand message. If money is tight, then you can use a combination of a dress code and corporate clothing. For example, in a fast-food environment, you could have staff dress as they wish but wear branded peaked caps. In a restaurant, you could have waiting staff in black and white but with branded aprons.

Corporate clothing makes staff identifiable

There are all kinds of reasons why you might want, or even need, staff to be identifiable. Probably the most obvious one is that it makes it easier for customers to see who to approach for help. Similarly, if you run a mobile operation, or just offer delivery, using corporate clothing can help to reassure customers that your staff are who they say they are.

In back-of-house roles, making staff easily identifiable can help to improve security. If all staff are dressed in corporate clothing then anyone not wearing that clothing will be instantly recognizable as non-staff. It can also help to improve workflows especially when staff are working at speed.

You can have different groups of staff wear different variations of your corporate clothing. This can make it possible for people to see, literally at a glance, who is working on what. It can also be used to identify people in specific roles, for example, people involved in health and safety (e.g. first aiders) or management.

Corporate clothing minimizes differences between staff

Of course, you want your staff to be individuals. At the same time, however, you generally need them to pull together as a team. Using corporate clothing puts everybody on the same page in terms of what to wear to work. That is often a lot easier and more effective than trying to put together a workable dress code that is clear, fair to everyone and enforceable.

Another important point is that a dress code is unlikely to be able to blur the differences between employees with different levels of disposable income. When you provide corporate clothing, everybody literally wears the same clothes (or variations of the same clothes). This eliminates all external distinctions and provides a cohesive feel as well as a cohesive look.

Corporate clothing helps separate work and play

With the COVID19 pandemic accelerating the trend of working from home, it has become increasingly clear that people need to be able to switch cleanly from “work” mode to “play” mode. Corporate clothing can help with this.

Firstly, it will become a part of an employee’s routine for starting and finishing work. This helps to ensure a boundary between them. Secondly, it will help to stop employees (and customers) from being asked for help when they are not at work.

When companies do not use corporate clothing, customers will often just approach someone who looks like they work there. This can be embarrassing for the customer and awkward for employees who are not on shift and want to go home.

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Ross Crayton

Managing Director at Core Workwear

Core Workwear are a family run business who specialise in providing great quality as well as great service. Based in Nottingham, we have become leading suppliers of high quality branded workwear, uniforms and clothing. Our in-house team of embroidery and printing experts are able to offer a wide range of products, delivered direct to your door. Talk to us today to see how our branded clothing can positively impact your business.