• "The apparel oft proclaims the man" – William Shakespeare.

• The Eng@ged Customer – Email Strategies for Creating Profitable Customer Relationships. Author: Hans Peter Brondmo. Publisher: Harper Collins.

• www.emarketer.com The best source of internet statistics that I have found.

Several years ago, I was contracted to oversee and manage a large corporate outplacement programme. In short, my role was to assist approximately one hundred people find new employment after they had been made redundant by a fairly savage corporate downsizing.

The result was extremely successful with 86% of participants finding new employment within the twelve-week programme.

One of the main reasons I believe the programme was so successful was because I was able to develop within the participants a ‘get real’ attitude. When it came to discussing dress and appearance, comments arose such as "I am who I am and what I look like shouldn’t make any difference", " I’ll wear what I like and they should be employing me for my brains, not how I look" and "I’m not getting my hair cut for anybody".

My response was that I agreed with them and that they certainly had the right to wear whatever they liked, however the reality that they faced was that prospective employers also had the right to hire whoever they liked. Did they want the job or not?

I recall one particular incident when one of the participants, a man in his early fifties with few qualifications, achieved his first job interview after eight weeks on the programme. His spirits were naturally buoyed by the prospect of finally obtaining new employment. On the morning of his interview he arrived at the outplacement centre wearing an un-ironed shirt and shoes that hadn’t seen a polishing brush for months. Rather than lecture him on what we had previously discussed before during the training part of the programme, I simply handed him a sealed envelope and asked him to go to the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror. When in front of the mirror, I asked that he open the envelope and read the note inside. The note read ‘based on what you see, would you employ the person in the mirror?’

The good news was that after returning home and ironing his shirt and stopping off to purchase a new pair of shoes he got the job. To this day I am convinced that he would not have been successful dressed the way he was.

Like it or not, people (customers) make huge assumptions based on what they see. Research reveals that within the first ten seconds of meeting someone for the first time, we make judgements about that persons economic level, educational level, trustworthiness, social position, level of sophistication, moral standing as well other aspects of their character and personality. In business terms, the first ten seconds is all it takes many people to decide whether or not they will do business with you. In a job interview, you have less than four minutes to get the job. The rest of the time is fluff and padding.

The ‘truth’ is that you can’t tell a book by its cover. The ‘reality’ is that most people do.

As I have mentioned many times before, everything you or your employees think, say or do communicates a message to your customers. The constant question to be asking is "what message are our actions conveying?" Obviously, the appearance of an internal factory worker, from a customer’s perspective, is not as critical as retail shop assistants, however the attitude behind being appropriately groomed is. Slovenly-attired factory workers will never perform to the levels of factory workers who take pride in their appearance. Buddha was right when he said, "how you do one thing is how you do everything". In essence, a well-groomed appearance has little to do with looks. It has everything to do with how that person feels about himself or herself. How that person feels about themselves impacts everything they think, say or do.

A final question, "how does your business feel about itself?"

Many happy customer returns!

Graham Harvey APS

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