This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: How do some people experience work as meaningful? Organizational 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 organizational concept: brand enchantment.
"I use the term for 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 Waldo. She explains that through these meanings, employees come to see their work, for instance, as part of something larger than everyday tasks and routines or as enjoyable and less routine.
Most of the employees interviewed were not designers or creators of the products but worked as legal staff, marketing staff or in other administrative roles. One employee, Mathieu, who held 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 glamorous 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 in 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.
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