Appropriate dress for service contact personnel will result in higher customer expectations of a firm's service quality than will inappropriate dress.
Empirical evidence indicates that dress may directly affect purchase intent. Again, research has been conducted on the relationship between person perception based on dress and individuals' evaluations and behaviors. Khan et al. (1996–1997) discovered that business clients gave higher likelihood-of-hiring ratings to CPAs dressed formally than to those dressed casually. In an advertising context, O'Neal and Lapitsky (1991) examined the influence of dress on credibility of a message source and intent to purchase. They indicated that subjects assigned significantly higher purchase intent ratings when a message source was dressed appropriately than when a message source was dressed inappropriately. In a study of the influence of a male military counselor, Huddleston and Engels (1987) concluded that subjects in their study expressed greater willingness to seek counseling when the counselor was in civilian dress than when the counselor was in uniform. Emswiler et al. (1971) found that a significantly larger number of individuals were willing to lend money to someone who resembled them in dress styles than those who did not resemble them in dress styles.
However, empirical research has little to say about how the appropriateness of commercial service contact employee dress affects consumers' purchase intent (i.e., a consumer's intention to purchase a service offering, or to patronize a service firm). The evidence reviewed would suggest that customers are more likely to purchase a service when they encounter appropriately dressed service contact personnel than when they encounter inappropriately dressed service contact personnel. Thus, it is hypothesized that: