Service and Experience with J. N. Halm: Colour matters: Customer experience and employee dress colour

Your favourite restaurant. Have you really thought about why it is your favourite place to have a meal? Your first answer might be, “Of course, the food is great.” Or you might add, “…and the staff are very friendly.” These two alone should be enough to cause one to fall in love with an eatery.

But have you thought about the attire those frontline employees wear? What’s the dominant colour of the uniform of the waiting staff? Or, like many, you do not believe aesthetics matter that much in why customers choose a particular establishment to do business with? Is it possible that—yes, the frontline employees are nice—but you are also drawn to that particular place because of the colour of the attire they have on?

Interestingly, if the results of a study published in the July 2021 edition of the Psychology & Marketing journal are anything to go by, then colours and emotions are not as separate as you might think. The study, titled “Toward Holistic Frontline Employee Management: An Investigation of the Interplay of Positive Emotion Displays and Dress Colour,” was carried out among a sample of 260 participants from a large customer panel in the UK. The researchers argued that, as much as positive emotional displays were important for frontline employees, aesthetic displays were also important. Talking of aesthetics, it is a fact that one of the most important elements of one’s appearance is the colour of what one is wearing.

According to the researchers, the colour of frontline employees’ clothing and the warmth of their smile are not two independent variables that customers process separately. They are experienced together as a single, unified impression. And the interaction between them has measurable consequences—for how much customers tip, for how warmly they perceive the employee, and ultimately for the quality of the entire service encounter.

To ensure that they came out with the best results, the researchers approached their study with a deceptively simple question: Does dress colour change what a positive emotion display does?

A positive emotion display, in the language of service research, is essentially a genuine smile, a warm facial expression, and the visible communication of goodwill towards the customer. Its importance in frontline service has been well established.

Customers respond to warmth. They rate interactions higher, they feel better about the encounter, and—importantly—they tip more generously when they perceive an employee as emotionally engaged. That much was already known.

What was not known is what happens when you pair that positive emotion display with a specific dress colour. The researchers designed four experiments to find out, and their findings are as instructive as they are surprising. Warm dress colours such as red, orange, and yellow—the colours that carry associations of heat, energy, and closeness—amplify the effect of a positive emotion display.

Customers who encountered a warmly dressed, smiling frontline employee tipped more and rated the employee as warmer than customers who encountered the same smiling employee dressed in cooler colours—blues, greens, the colours of distance and detachment.

In explaining the relationship between colour and emotions, the researcher made it clear that warm colours did not simply make customers feel good. And combined with the emotional lift produced by the smile, warm colours did not create a doubly positive experience. Far from that.

What actually happens is this: customers perceive a fit—or a lack of fit—between the visual signals an employee is sending. When a warm smile is paired with a warm colour, the customer’s mind registers a coherence between the two signals.

The emotional display and the aesthetic display are consistent with each other. They tell the same story. And when two signals align, the overall impression they produce is stronger than either could produce alone.

Conversely, when a warm smile is paired with a cold colour, a subtle incongruence registers—not necessarily at the level of conscious thought, but as a faint cognitive friction that softens the impact of the smile. The employee still seems pleasant. But something, somewhere, does not quite add up.

There is a whole science behind this phenomenon. Experts agree that we do not experience a smile in isolation. We experience it in context—against a background of everything else we are simultaneously observing about the person in front of us. Their posture, tone of voice, the environment they inhabit, and, of course, the colour of what they are wearing. All of this is processed together, rapidly and largely below the threshold of conscious awareness, to produce a unified impression.

The results of the study under consideration have profound implications for the way we think about the management of frontline employee appearance. For most businesses, uniform design is treated as a branding exercise—a matter of ensuring that staff look professional, that colours align with the corporate palette, and that the overall visual impression is consistent with the identity the business wants to project.

These are entirely legitimate concerns. But they are incomplete ones. The research now asks us to consider a further question: does the uniform amplify or diminish what the employee’s face is communicating?

A business that dresses its frontline team in cool, corporate blues and greys and then expects those employees to radiate warmth towards customers is, according to this research, working against itself. The uniform is sending one signal.

The smile is sending another. And the customer, processing both simultaneously, arrives at an impression that is less than the sum of its parts. The warmth the employee genuinely feels and genuinely communicates is being quietly undermined by an aesthetic choice made, in all probability, by someone in a head office who was thinking about brand guidelines rather than service psychology.

One can only imagine how many businesses across the hospitality, retail, and service sectors are unknowingly making exactly this mistake. The investment in selecting the right people, training them to engage warmly with customers, and building a service culture that values genuine human connection is considerable. The investment in choosing a uniform colour that reinforces rather than undermines all of that work is, by comparison, negligible. And yet it is the latter decision that most businesses make without any reference to the science at all.

The practical guidance that emerges from the research is refreshingly actionable. For service businesses where positive emotion displays are central to the customer experience—and this includes most businesses in hospitality, healthcare, retail, and financial services—the choice of frontline uniform colour should be made with explicit consideration of the emotional signal it sends. Warm colours are not universally appropriate.

There are service contexts where a cooler, more formal aesthetic is exactly what the customer needs to feel confidence and trust. A surgeon in a warm amber scrub top would not inspire reassurance. But a hotel receptionist, a restaurant server, a bank teller whose role is as much emotional as it is transactional—for these employees, the colour of their uniform is doing work that their managers have probably never credited it with doing.

There is something quietly humbling about research like this. It reminds us that the customer experience is not only built from the big, deliberate choices—the service training, the complaint handling process, the loyalty programme. It is also built, continuously and invisibly, from the small ones. The lighting in the room. The texture of the chair.

The colour of a uniform. None of these things, on their own, defines an experience. But all of them, together and in concert with everything else, shape how a customer feels—and whether the warmth of the person serving them lands as warmth, or is quietly lost somewhere between the smile and the seeing.

The best service businesses have always understood, intuitively, that everything communicates. This research simply tells us, with precision, that the colour of the attire does too.

Photo Credit: Kateryna Kovarzh

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