Deep in my conscience, I do know that my valuable advise to my customers to at least have one special tailor-made “power suit” in their closet made with high end fabric as Loro Piana, Zegna, Huddersfield, Guabello or Canonico is a good investment. It gives that special “Ummph” feeling for an important board meetings, important customer meetings, presentations or to get the next dream job and acing it at that important job interview. This made a lot of sense to me and it helped me personally in the past. But till to date it was just my own conception, thoughts based on my experiences in my own career demands.
I had nothing concrete to back on this advice except from my personal experience & client’s feedbacks. But now I finally found solid back up, a research team at University of Notre Dame, the University of Kentucky, and Smeal College of Business, Pennsylvania State University found out that using branded gear improves your performance by up to 20% in comparison to a group which was using non-branded gear. It worked even in the study for a math quiz where the participants using branded ear plugs performed about 20% better than participants using non branded ear plugs. Of course, the math quiz performance has nothing much to do with the ear plug brand but rather with the placebo effect it causes. It boost the self esteem of the user who then performs better as it also lowers performance anxiety.
One of the researchers, Frank Germann, a Ph.D and assistant professor at the Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business says: “Some people have a power suit that they put on for important presentations, or they have some special cufflink that they put on to bring them luck….I think our research would suggest that engaging in that kind of behaviour might actually work.”
The study was mainly based on 2 former studies where in 2008 researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo found out that if your are exposed to certain bands that you take in their traits. In this case a group which was exposed to Apple branding performed a task in a more creative way then another group which was exposed to IBM. The study also found out that being exposed to Disney Channel logo makes you more honest then being exposed to the logo of E ! Entertainment. Scary? Right!
To make it even more obvious, respectively extreme and scary, similar results were found in a study from 2011at Boston College where exposure at a driving simulator to the Red Bull logo on the car made participants driving faster and they took more risk comparable to the ones used cars with Coca-Cola, Tropicana or Guinness logo.
In conclusion, using a “Power Suit”, ideally bespoke tailored, will not guarantee your success in what you do, but it will boost your self-esteem and reduce your anxiety when facing a stressful situation, whilst giving you a better chance of being successful.
So what are you waiting for, get on that “Power Suit” and rock your world!
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