How do some people experience work as meaningful? Organisational researcher, Rachel Waldo at Lund University, argues that one important answer has been largely overlooked: the brand itself.
Based on 39 in-depth interviews with employees in different roles across luxury houses within LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), she shows that brands do more than attract customers. They can also shape how employees understand their work as meaningful.
At the heart of the dissertation is a new organisational concept: Brand enchantment.
"I use the term on employees rather than consumers. It describes the process through which employees develop an emotional connection to a brand by embracing and sustaining its symbolic meanings: craftsmanship, creativity, heritage, beauty, exclusivity, and prestige for instance", says Rachel Waldo.
She continues explaining that through these meanings, the employees come to see their work, for instance, as part of something larger than everyday tasks and routines or as enjoyable and less routine. An interesting aspect of her research is that most of the employees that were interviewed were not designers or creators of the products, but worked as legal staff, marketing staff or in other administrative roles.
Idealised image
One employee, Mathieu, in a senior sales position, described how he had felt attached to the brand's products since his youth and continued to wear the same fragrance decades later as an employee. When work became frustrating, he sought inspiration in the house's haute couture creations, which represented the founder's artistic vision and craftsmanship. Waldo argues that these encounters helped him reconnect with the glamourous world of the brand, helping him overcome work challenges and disappointments.
Yet the dissertation also challenges the idea that employees simply absorb corporate messaging. Waldo found that workers actively engage with brand meanings by embracing and sustaining them while sometimes recognizing tensions between the brand's ideals and organizational reality.
That tension is visible in the story of Maelle, who worked with packaging development for a luxury wine and spirits house. She expressed frustration that cost-cutting and mass-market logic sometimes seemed at odds with the values of craftsmanship, rarity, and excellence associated with the brand. Nevertheless, she remained deeply attached to what she called the brand's exceptional know-how and production expertise. Learning about the products' heritage and manufacturing process allowed her to view her work as contributing to the brand's heritage and success, despite the less glamorous realities of her day-to-day responsibilities.
Brand enchanted meaningful work
These stories led Waldo to develop a second concept: brand-enchanted meaningful work. She defines it as an experience of work as meaningful based on the brand's meanings and the emotions it evokes. Employees derive meaningfulness not only from what they do, but from what the brand represents and from their emotional connection to the brand.
" This is probably my main theoretical contribution. Research on meaningful work has traditionally focused on job design, leadership, personal values, or workplace relationships. Here I identify the brand itself as a previously underexplored source of meaningfulness and demonstrate the emotional mechanisms through which that meaning is created" Rachel Waldo concludes.
At a time when organizations increasingly compete for talent through purpose, identity, and values, her findings suggest that brands do not merely sell products. They can also provide employees with stories through which they construct their work as meaningful. The question, Waldo suggests, is no longer only why consumers become connected to brands, but why employees do too.
Publication:
Link to the PhD dissertation:
