Abstract
The authors address the challenges individuals face when managing their professional brands while working in “prestigious posts” (high-profile jobs in established organizations) and striving to maintain career mobility. Using a case study approach and drawing on sociological field theories, the authors identify two types of tensions (resource-based and identity-based) that are triggered by prestigious posts and four practices conducive to mitigating tensions and maintaining mobility. Beyond extending prior theory on person brands to include consideration of career mobility, this work has implications for better understanding the complexities of affiliations between professionals and the brands they work for. It suggests that individuals who are managing their professional brands while holding prestigious posts need to strike a balance between benefiting from the affiliation in the eyes of external stakeholders and at the same time maintaining their professional independence to maintain career mobility.
Keywords
If once upon a time the top job at a big brand was the ultimate prize for many designers—and once you got it, you didn’t let go till they pried the sketch pad from your withered hands—now the average term seems to be three years or less.
The opening quote points to a puzzling phenomenon: not infrequently, individuals who hold prized positions with “big brands” part ways—often voluntarily—with the high-profile organizations they work for. This phenomenon is particularly perplexing in light of marketing research suggesting that senior executives so value the identity benefits of working for prominent brands that those who do so willingly accept lower remuneration than individuals working for less prominent brands (Tavassoli, Sorescu, and Chandy 2014). And while many scholars argue that externally visible leaders are critical to the fortunes of the organizations they work for (e.g., Bendisch, Larsen, and Trueman 2013; Dion and Arnould 2011; Fournier and Eckhardt 2019; Humphreys and Carpenter 2018), we know little about the challenges faced by those who take on high-profile jobs in established organizations, what might lead them to voluntarily move on from such “prestigious posts,” or how they can preserve professional brand equity to facilitate career mobility.
The limited research to date on individuals who are navigating prestigious posts is particularly significant given that these individuals can be regarded as having professional brands, the management of which can represent a significant challenge as well as a significant opportunity (e.g., Close, Moulard, and Monroe 2011; Gorbatov, Khapova, and Lysova 2018; Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013; Rein et al. 2006; Zamudio, Wang, and Haruvy 2013). And while existing research has shed some light on how individuals manage their professional brands so as to be successful in obtaining work (e.g., Close, Moulard, and Monroe 2011; Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013; Zamudio, Wang, and Haruvy 2013), thus far, we lack theoretical insights regarding how individuals protect and promote their professional brands during periods of employment. In particular, we know little about how people who hold prestigious posts can manage their professional brands so as to maintain their career mobility or their potential to start businesses of their own. To address this gap, we seek to answer two research questions. First, for an individual and their professional brand, what tensions are triggered while working in a prestigious post? And, second, what practices are conducive to mitigating these tensions and enhancing professional brand equity in a way that promotes career mobility?
We address these questions through an inductive analysis of 20 cases of creative directors (also known as designers, artistic directors, or chief creative officers) who have had one or more prestigious posts at top heritage brands (i.e., brands who emphasize their history as a key component of their identity; Urde, Greyser, and Balmer 2007), in the creative field of high fashion. Using sociological field theory as an enabling lens when analyzing our data, we identify two types of tensions that are triggered and a range of practices conducive to mitigating tensions.
Answering these questions will provide both theoretical and managerial insights. On a conceptual level, our research extends theories of person branding by shedding light on the challenges and opportunities that face people who have, or who are building, high-profile professional brands while holding prestigious posts, a topic not touched on in prior research on people managing professional brands (e.g., Close, Moulard, and Monroe 2011; Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013; Zamudio, Wang, and Haruvy 2013). Our research also complements prior work on the complex symbolic relationship between employees and the brands they work for (e.g., Gill-Simmen et al. 2018; Tavassoli, Sorescu, and Chandy 2014) by identifying boundary conditions on the extent to which employees may derive benefits from employment affiliations with powerful brands. Finally, our work can provide practical guidance for individuals facing critical decisions regarding how to promote and protect their interests as they manage their professional brands over the course of their careers. Although the marketing literature to date has shed light on career management for selected categories of employees who matter to marketing strategy and/or execution, in particular salespeople (e.g., Cron 1984; Johnson and Mattes 2018), it has largely remained silent on how other categories of actors, such as professionals in prestigious posts, can effectively manage their career mobility.
The remainder of our article is organized as follows. First, relevant literature on professional branding is reviewed to highlight both the differences between person and product brands and to identify potentially relevant insights from prior research. Next, we outline some key premises of sociological field theories (Kluttz and Fligstein 2016; Martin 2003); these field theories constitute the enabling lens adopted here to help conceptualize the contingent relationships between individuals, their professional brands, and the prestigious organizations they work for. We then provide details on the context of our study, high fashion, wherein individuals may be enrolled in prestigious posts as creative directors, and describe the qualitative methodology used to develop theory inductively. Our findings are then developed, and implications for theory and practice follow.
Key Insights from Prior Research on Branding
Professional branding matters to the careers and prosperity of virtually every individual (Kotler and Levy, 1969). As scholars have come to realize that insights into product marketing cannot simply be generalized to individuals, a growing body of scholarly research has extended our understanding of the challenges individuals face in managing their professional brands. Some work has focused on enterprising individuals who develop products or services that they market (e.g., Dion and Arnould 2016; Fournier and Eckhardt 2019). Other work—some of it in the popular press (e.g. Peters 1999)—has examined how people seeking to gain employment or promotion in established organizations may brand themselves effectively (e.g., Close, Moulard, and Monroe 2011; Rein et al. 2006; Shephard 2005; Zamudio, Wang, and Haruvy 2013).
Several key insights have emerged from prior research. One important building block for person branding research has been the identification of conceptual distinctions between brands that are associated with products/services and brands that are associated with individuals. For example, the concept of positioning needs to be broadened to accommodate people with professional brands; unlike product brands, for which differentiation is foundational to positioning, those who manage their professional brands must balance “standing out” with “fitting into” their organizational fields (Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013). Further, brands based on individuals are subject to vulnerabilities not common to product/service brands, such as mortality, hubris, unpredictability, and social embeddedness, all of which arise from the human characteristics of the person who is central to their own brand (Fournier and Eckhardt 2019). Consistent with these human vulnerabilities, some research has found that although equity for product brands is stable and long lasting, the equity of person brands is likely to erode substantially over time (Luo et al. 2010).
Along with clarifying conceptual continuities and distinctions between an individual’s brand and a product’s, prior literature has also clarified the distinctions between the concept of person brands who are celebrities (cf. Thomson 2006) and person brands who are professionals (e.g. Parmentier and Fischer 2012): celebrity entails being famous beyond a restricted field of endeavor (Gamson 1994; Marshall 1997; McCracken 1989; Turner 2004), whereas professional branding typically does not. To be clear, an individual’s brand may be well known within their field of practice (e.g., Close, Moulard, and Monroe 2011; Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013; Zamudio, Wang, and Haruvy 2013), and their brand’s equity may be high as a result of its familiarity to a field-specific audience (e.g., McQuarrie et al. 2013; Rein et al. 2006). Some scholars even adopt the term “micro-celebrity” (e.g., Marwick and boyd 2011) to refer to individuals who have high visibility in a restricted field. However, as Tufekci (2013, p. 850) notes, micro-celebrities are not celebrities in the “Hollywood or fan-based sense,” but rather in the sense that they have relatively high visibility and status within a restricted field.
Yet another useful conceptual premise that has emerged from the literature is the distinction between the person and their brand (Dion and Borraz 2015; Fournier and Eckhardt 2019; Smith and Fischer 2020). The person brand is a “publicly performed” persona (Dion and Arnould 2016, p. 2) that draws on some but not all elements of the person (Marwick 2015). The person, of course, is a complex amalgam of corporeal elements, emotions, and cognitions that make them a unique human being; Fournier and Eckhardt (2019) contrast the term the “body natural” with the “body public” to capture the distinction between the person and their brand. Distinctions can also be drawn between person brands that are commercialized as products (as in the case of Martha Stewart or Ralph Lauren) and professional brands that are not yet, or not currently, marketing products that bear their name (Fournier and Eckhardt 2019). This suggests that while a professional brand can become a productized person brand, the two should not be conflated, because professional brands may never develop eponymous commercial product lines.
While this body of prior research yields invaluable insights, it stops short of illuminating our focal phenomenon: individuals who must manage their professional brands when working in prestigious posts. Considerable research indicates that professionals in many fields tend to hold high-profile jobs for relatively limited periods of time and move from job to job within an industry with some frequency (e.g., Godart et al. 2015; Kipping, Bühlmann, and David 2019; Wang, Gupta, and Grewal 2017). Thus, individuals working in prestigious posts must ensure that they safeguard and build their professional brand equity such that they preserve their career mobility for taking on new posts or running their own businesses. This means it is imperative to develop theoretical insights relevant to individuals who move in and out of paid employment and who may sometimes choose to develop and monetize their own products or services. Executive chefs, tech leaders, journalists, leading consultants, architects, and (focal in our work) creative directors of heritage fashion brands all constitute examples of individuals who must navigate effectively through the process of engaging in prestigious posts and (often) exiting from them. And while some prior research has studied contexts in which individuals hold prestigious posts, such as Michelin-starred restaurants (Dion and Arnould 2016) and fashion houses (Dion and Arnould 2011), none has focused on the tensions related to an individual’s professional brand that are likely to be triggered when that individual takes on a prestigious post, or on practices conducive to preserving and building brand equity when mitigating tensions triggered by prestigious posts. Our research addresses these gaps, drawing on the enabling lens of sociological field theories, which we review in the following section. We have adopted this enabling lens because field theories allow us to conceptualize individuals who are managing their professional brands as actors in institutionalized social systems: although this perspective is not inherent to the literature on branding, it is essential for understanding the social contexts that individuals navigate as they manage their professional brands.
Key Insights from Sociological Field Theories
Marketing scholars have frequently drawn on specific sociological field perspectives to help them develop theoretical insights on marketplace phenomena. For example, Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli (2015), Handelman and Arnold (1999), and Humphreys (2010) all draw on elements of neo-institutional theory to develop theories about the marketing strategies appropriate under specific types of field-level conditions. In contrast, numerous researchers have relied primarily on concepts drawn from Bourdieu’s praxeological perspective to help explain complex patterns of behavior exhibited by consumers in particular kinds of contexts (e.g., Allen 2002; Arsel and Thompson 2011; Holt 1998). Here, we follow the lead of others (e.g., Dolbec and Fischer 2015; Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013; Scaraboto and Fischer 2013) who have drawn on multiple sociological field theories simultaneously to enable their theorizing. We do so because we must appropriate insights from multiple field theories to adequately address our research questions. For example, Bourdieu’s theory provides us with the notion of symbolic capital for which individuals strive when managing their professional brand; neo-institutional theory offers us an understanding of institutional logics that shape what counts as symbolic capital; and Giddens’ structuration theory offers us insights into people’s reflexivity with regard to which logics they adhere to. In the following paragraphs, we highlight precepts from sociological field theories that are particularly relevant for our work.
Although nuanced variations are evident in the focus of field theories, this family of theories has certain elements in common. The first is a concern with how sets of actors that hold varying positions and resources within a field orient their actions toward others in the same fields (note that “fields” can be defined as arenas of action, such as the arena of action associated with heritage fashion houses). The second is the premise that there are tacit, institutionalized understandings that govern orderly interactions within fields, understandings that are shared by actors habituated to the field and that allow them to interpret the actions of others, frame responses, and jockey for position (Kluttz and Fligstein 2016; Martin 2003). For example, in the field of fashion, actors habituated to the field recognize the status associated with being seated in the front row versus the second or third row during a house’s fashion show (Dolbec and Fischer 2015).
The term “actor” within field theories can refer to individuals, categories of stakeholders, specific firms or groups of firms, or other aggregates of entities that have agency; likewise, the term “field” can refer to arenas of action that are, for example, within particular organizations, within markets comprising multiple organizations, within states, or within some other unit of analysis (Kluttz and Fligstein 2016, p. 186). This is important for our study because it means that an individual managing their professional brand while engaged in a prestigious post is simultaneously a member of at least two fields, the expectations or norms of which will overlap only partially: one field is the specific prestigious organization for which the individual is currently working; the other is the broader field of which the prestigious organization is a member and of which future prospective employers are also likely to be members. While field theories suggest that organizations that compete in the same field will often strive to appear to conform to taken-for-granted rules of behavior that are common in that field (i.e., to be isomorphic [DiMaggio and Powell 1993]), this does not mean that the fields internal to organizations within a given sector are homogeneous, especially considering organizations continually strive for strategic advantage (e.g., Oliver 1991; Suchman 1995). In other words, the fields internal to organizations are likely to vary in the tacit rules, norms, and expectations that are relevant to those who work within them. Field theories, then, lead us to pay attention to both complementarity and conflict in the taken-for-granted norms, expectations, and rules of the game that an individual might face that are local to the organization that currently employs them versus those at the level of the broader industry in which they are likely to seek future employment or manage their own enterprise.
Another key insight of field theories is that actors who are familiar with a field typically recognize, though do not inevitably act in accordance with, its shared norms and rules (e.g., Giddens 1984). Whereas fields structure what actors value and influence their understandings and expectations, actors have the agentic capacity to vary in their conformity to rules and norms, and to seek to accumulate resources and advance their own interests relative to that of others. Field theories highlight that the resources and advantages that actors seek might include greater legitimacy (i.e., “the generalized perception or assumption that the actions of an entity are desirable, proper or appropriate within some socially constructed system of norms, values, beliefs and definitions”; Suchman 1995, p. 574) or the accumulation of various forms of capital (whether economic, social, cultural, or symbolic; cf. Bourdieu 1986). In the current context, recognizing the embedded agency of actors sensitizes us to considering how individuals working in prestigious posts may deliberately deviate from tacit norms or expectations at the organizational field level if doing so can protect or promote their professional brand. At the same time, field theorists have also cautioned against hyper-rationalized views of actors in fields, owing to the many conflicting sources of expectations they may face. For example, Handelman and Arnold (1999), discussing marketing managers, stated: “Rather than being strictly rational and strategic, much of what the marketing manager does involves attempting to adhere to a disparate set of norms that is often inconsistent and conflicting” (Handelman and Arnold 1999, p. 34). Their insights seem likely to be equally applicable to individuals managing their professional brands while working in prestigious posts, and we bear in mind their observation while addressing our research questions.
A precept that has emerged more recently within sociological field theories concerns institutional “logics” which have been defined as “socially constructed, historical patterns of cultural symbols and material practices, assumptions, values and beliefs by which individuals produce and reproduce their material subsistence, organize time and space, and provide meaning to their daily activity” (Thornton et al. 2012, p. 51). As research on institutional logics has progressed, scholars have noted that fields are often dominated by more than one logic, and that organizations may compete by blending logics or by adhering solely to a single logic (e.g., Ertimur and Coskuner-Bali 2015). The field of fashion is characterized by two dominant institutional logics, the logic of art and the logic of commerce (e.g., Scaraboto and Fischer 2013), and heritage fashion houses must successfully blend these logics to maintain their legitimacy as well as their financial solvency. This, too, has implications for creative directors who bear considerable responsibility for ensuring that the brands they work for manage this balancing act successfully (Godart et al. 2015; Ryan 2007). Having reviewed key element of our enabling lens, we next describe the context we studied, the data we collected, and the analysis of that data.
Context, Methods, and Data
Sometimes it can seem as if the designers at the top of the industry’s best-known brands are engaged in a never-ending game of musical chairs. For every Karl Lagerfeld, presiding over the design studios at Chanel and Fendi for decades, and Giorgio Armani (ditto), a dozen more have come and gone as creative directors at luxury houses…sometimes in as little as 18 months.
This research follows a hermeneutical approach that examines the cultural categories and discourses that inform the views and actions of people situated in particular contexts (Arnold and Fischer 1994; Belk, Fischer, and Kozinets 2012). That context is high fashion, and our focus is on the creative directors who lead the heritage brands at the center of this industry. As the term “heritage” implies, brands within this set are not those that have been recently established, but rather those that “emphasize their history as a key component of their identity” (Dion and Borraz 2015, p. 77). The role of creative directors in this context is thus to “see the heritage through fresh eyes” and repackage it in more modern terms (Wong 2018). The brands within this setting include many of the established houses studied by Bourdieu in the 1970s (and a few he then considered upstarts) when he was conducting his seminal research on fashion as a cultural field in a state of transition (Bourdieu 1993; Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975). While membership in this elite group is not static (new members can gain status within the field, and old ones can go out of business or be resurrected [Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975; Parmentier and Fischer 2018]), current brands that are indisputably heritage fashion houses include Balenciaga, Burberry, Chanel, Dior, Fendi, Gucci, Hermès, Lanvin, Louis Vuitton, Prada, and Saint Laurent (Cox, 2013).
Today, many of these brands are owned by publicly traded luxury conglomerates, such as LVMH, Richemont, and Kering (formerly PPR) (e.g., Barkey and Godart 2013; Djelic and Ainamo 1999), and no heritage house continues to be managed by its original founder (most of whom are deceased). Instead, the conglomerates employ creative directors who play a critical leadership role in steering the brand’s aesthetic, defining the collections produced by the house each year, and maintaining its legitimacy in the field (e.g., Dion and Arnould 2011; Parmentier and Fischer 2018), as well as contributing to the brand’s commercial success (Godart et al. 2015). Indeed, scholars argue that for heritage fashion houses, creative directors are “the most significant public figures and most influential organizational leaders…rather than their CEOs” (Godart et al. 2015, p. 201) and note that although they work with teams who contribute immensely to the house’s offering, they are the “‘stars’ in the production of fashion” (Kawamura 2005, p. 57). As such, creative directors are also critical to gaining ongoing media coverage for the heritage houses in the fashion press (Rocamora 2002). As one journalist puts it: The reality is that most people don’t want to read much about the concept of a new heel or bag shape or the inspiration behind a fragrance. As a journalist, how often has one struggled to explain to a PR [public relations professional] that there simply isn’t an interesting story in the journey of a new clutch? How often have they had to beg the designer to give some of themselves up, in return for a six-page print story? (Shulman 2018).
This context is well suited to our research questions given the evident mobility of many of those appointed to the prestigious position of creative director (Godart, Shipilov, and Claes 2014). This mobility is sometimes characterized by the media as akin to a game of musical chairs, and its pace has been so frantic that fashion journalists have frequently produced and updated “cheat sheets” to help fashion audiences keep track of who is heading what house. 1 The unwavering interest among members of the fashion field in the comings and goings of creative directors, and the coverage that results from this interest, has had the advantage of generating a considerable volume of archival data, making public matters that might otherwise remain private.
Many have speculated about the reasons behind this churn among creative directors. The New York Times fashion director Vanessa Friedman argues, for example, that the owners of heritage houses have become wary of allowing designers to have “dominance over all the visual and emotional touch points between brand and consumer” as Tom Ford once had at Gucci, before he had a highly publicized power struggle with Gucci management and made a precipitous departure. She believes that cases such as this: …convinced everyone that handing authority to the creative side to the extent that they became synonymous with their house was dangerous as they could just leave. The safest way to proceed would be to make the designer serve the brand, not the other way around. Designers (at least the majority of them; a select few, such as Karl Lagerfeld, remained a world unto themselves) became “work for hire,” seemingly regarded as practically interchangeable by their employers: Shirts not selling? Get rid of X; hire Y! When critics complained about the resulting aesthetic whiplash, executives would shake their heads and accuse them…of myopia; customers, they said, had no idea. (Friedman 2016)
Methods and Data
We focused on 20 creative directors who between 2009 and 2019 were at the helm of one of the ten most influential heritage fashion houses according to French trade authority Journal du Textile (see Table 1). Note that some of these creative directors were also heading their own entrepreneurial, sometimes eponymous, label and that as mentioned in the opening quote of this section, one individual, Karl Lagerfeld, held more than one prestigious post at a time (Chanel and Fendi). While all the individuals in our sample can be said to have relatively successful professional brands, those able to capitalize on their brand equity by gaining a second (or third) prestigious post can arguably be said to have higher professional brand equity than their peers who have not (yet) done so.
Creative Directors and Their Prestigious Posts.
a Deceased 2019.
Notes: present = as of September 2020.
Consistent with a hermeneutic approach (Arnold and Fischer 1994), which requires developing a nuanced understanding of a field of action, we initially conducted interviews with six high-fashion professionals based in Paris. These informants (a buyer, style director, PR and communication executive, high-fashion consultant, and two fashion scholars) either worked for or had experience working with the main luxury conglomerates that own the heritage brands under consideration in this study. The interviews were conducted in French or English, either at the informants’ places of work or in cafés, and lasted between 30 minutes and 1.5 hours. Interviewing these experts allowed us to gain a greater understanding of the role of the creative director at heritage brands, the dynamics of the field of high fashion both locally (Europe) and internationally (Asia and North America), and the challenges fashion professionals face in managing their careers and brands.
In conjunction with interview data, we also collected observational data by attending six heritage brands’ exhibits where the work of the creative directors in our sample was prominently featured (e.g., Alber Elbaz: “Alber Elbaz-Lanvin,” Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Marc Jacobs and Nicolas Ghesquière: “Louis Vuitton: Volez, Voguez, Voyagez,” Grand Palais, Paris; and John Galliano and Raf Simons: “Dior: La Révolution du New Look,” Musée Christian Dior, Granville) and by visiting in-house museums and corporate spaces of heritage brands in France (Louis Vuitton workshop and museum, Asnières-sur-Seine) and Italy (Gucci museum, Florence). From these exhibits and visits, we gathered field notes featuring insights shared by staff and personal observations, pictures of archival materials (e.g., sketches, private notes, displays), and promotional materials available to the general public.
As is common for research focused on individuals with highly visible professional brands who have held prestigious posts (e.g., Fournier and Eckhardt, 2019; Godart et al. 2015), we compiled our primary data from publicly available archival sources. In line with our focus on individuals in prestigious posts, we collected available print and video profiles of and interviews with the creative directors in our sample (307 documents), as well as in-depth coverage of the musical chair phenomenon (50 documents). These archival data were collected from the global news database Factiva for mainstream news titles (e.g., The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times), private search engines of specialized titles (e.g., The Business of Fashion, Women’s Wear Daily, Vogue), Google and Bing for fashion blogs (e.g., Fashionista), and ad hoc coverage (e.g., Vice). A set of research assistants trained in qualitative research methods, communication studies, and library studies assisted in this search. Assistants specifically selected in-depth profiles and interviews in French or English of creative directors as opposed to the frequent fashion show coverage of creative directors’ seasonal collections. We used information from the Journal du Textile when initially selecting our sample of creative directors; because it was not searchable online, we gathered print materials published twice a year to cover the Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer collections at the private library of the Institut de la Mode in Paris. Finally, we also included 15 monographs (e.g., Gucci: The Making Of), 8 podcasts (e.g., Vogue), and 5 documentaries (e.g., Dior & I) that discussed the careers of the creative directors in our dataset (for a table summarizing our data set, see the Web Appendix).
To analyze our data, we followed an iterative process of dialectical tackling (Arnold and Fischer 1994) between contextual data, conceptual material, and research questions. This process entailed interpreting individual accounts in light of the cultural context under investigation; deriving new research questions; searching for and collecting new data; and rejecting, confirming, and refining our emerging interpretation until reaching sufficient interpretive convergence. We incorporated the enabling lens of sociological field theory into our analysis after several rounds of largely inductive coding had occurred. Once we had identified patterns inductively, we realized that sociological field theories could usefully be appropriated to make better sense of the findings and embed them in a well-developed theoretical perspective. This approach is a common way to utilize enabling lenses in the course of analyzing qualitative data (Dolbec, Canniford, and Fischer 2020).
Findings
We begin with an overview of the theoretical insights that have been developed through analyzing data to address our research questions. As highlighted by our field theoretic perspective, the work done by professional brands takes place within institutional fields that encompass the organizations that employ them; thus, the broader field, as well as the employer organization, constitute the salient context for the performance of professional brands. Our analysis suggests that working a prestigious post can trigger two types of tension for an individual managing their professional brand: resource-related and identity-related tensions. Our analysis further indicates that individuals mitigate (i.e., partially ameliorate) these tensions by engaging in a range of practices, some oriented more internally to the organizational field and others more externally to the broader institutional field. Practices that particularly address the tensions related to resources include “transporting teams” and “out-conforming to commercial logics.” Practices that particularly address the tensions related to identity include “selectively neglecting local normative expectations” and “materializing the professional brand in the broader market.” We explicate and illustrate these inductive insights in the following subsections.
Tensions Triggered When Managing Professional Brands While Working in Prestigious Posts
Resource-related tensions refer to the paradox that arises because prestigious posts both contribute and deplete resources that are critical to an individual’s professional brand. On the positive side, having a prestigious post can contribute considerable economic and noneconomic resources that can benefit the professional brand, the most obvious of which is income paid; however, creative directors are also sometimes offered shares in the company they work for or investments in their own entrepreneurial labels. For example, when Marc Jacobs was the creative director of Louis Vuitton, its parent company (LVMH) invested heavily in Jacob’s eponymous label (Wang 2013).
Less obvious but no less important to the professional brand are the knowledge and skills that creative directors can accumulate when they take on a prestigious post. In the following passage, Alexander Wang describes how the prospect of learning new skills and having new sources of inspiration convinced him to take on the job of creative director at Balenciaga despite the fact that he was preoccupied with building his own label when the opportunity arose: Well, you know when the opportunity first came, it was not something that I was searching for. You know I have my brand with my family that we own 100% of. So, you know there is a, there is a liberty and comfort level to be, just to have that, you know and…I was really doing a lot of the areas, you know. And when the opportunity came…I wasn’t prepared for and so naturally my instinct was, oh I’m so preoccupied with my own brand, I don’t know if I can take this on. But the more conversations that I had with Mr. Pinault [CEO of Kering, owner of the Balenciaga brand] and the team,…the more my mind opened up in terms of thinking about working in a different way in a different context in a different environment and…then I got to visit the archives and kinda one thing led to the other then I realized that this will be something that I would really be able to exercise a different part of my brain with. And again, a learning opportunity for me. (
WSJ Magazine 2015) Oh no, this is my life’s project. I’m never going to start another brand. But I also have an opportunity now to do another brand [Balenciaga] myself. Creatively it’s another opportunity to do something I would not be able to do at Vetements. (Voight 2016)
Despite the opportunity to acquire both economic and noneconomic resources through a prestigious post, however, creative directors also suffer the depletion of key resources in the course of those posts. The demands of such positions may erode attentional, physical, and emotional resources that are crucial if the individual is to successfully manage their professional brand. A journalist commenting on this danger wrote, “What happens if you get a dream job [as a creative director at a heritage house]? Increasingly that is an unavoidable choice for young designers who come to public attention by starting their own labels with a few friends, and even fewer funds, and then get snapped up by heritage names with big budgets, reputations and resources. There is one catch: The roles require full commitment.” (Paton 2019)
The creative directors we studied have spoken frequently of the toll taken by prestigious posts. For example, Raf Simons spoke of the demands of his job as creative director of Dior: The problem is when you have only one design team and six collections, there is no more thinking time. And I don’t want to do collections where I’m not thinking. In this system, Pieter [Mulier, Simons’ right hand] and I can’t sit together and brainstorm—no time. I have a schedule every day that begins at 10 in the morning and runs through the day, and every, every minute is filled. From 10.10 am to 10.30 am, it’s shoes, let’s say. From 10.30 to 11.15, it’s jewellery. Everything is timed—the whole week. If there’s a delay in a meeting, the whole day is fucked up…. Everything is done in three weeks, maximum five. You have no incubation time for ideas, and incubation time is very important…. What are you going to do? Walk out of the office at 8 o’clock at night? No, of course not. So you stay there until midnight. That’s the life…. There’s never enough time. You get a tension. (Horyn n.d.)
Alber Elbaz, reflecting on his work as the creative director of Lanvin, expresses a similar sentiment: I always say that doing a collection is almost like writing a book or making a movie, and I don’t know any other industry that can produce six movies a year by the same director. That’s the thing. You cannot write six books a year. You cannot produce six movies. You can’t do six collections a year. And I think this is actually what is making fashion be the way it is today. I know a lot of people complain that there is not enough change and that fashion in the past was much more creative than today, and I think a big part of this phenomenon is that we don’t have the time to think, we don’t have the time to project, we don’t have the time to digest.…When I go out sometimes to this kind of fashion event and I see other designers, I see that one of them has a pain in the back and the other one has a migraine and the third one is exhausted, because we are going through this process that is endless. (Standen 2010)
These demands can also put considerable pressure on the individual’s emotional life, inside and outside work. One of the most extreme examples is illustrated by John Galliano, who gained notoriety for substance abuse, which triggered such appalling behavior in public that it cost him his job as creative director of Dior. Galliano, reflecting back on his descent, states: What started with two collections a year became 32 collections a year and a show every four weeks. It was non-stop. Galliano [his eponymous label], Dior, the haute couture, the men’s. It was insane. It was all about being bigger and bigger, better and better. I didn’t know how to stop. Sometimes we’d start a fitting and we’d be thinking, ‘Hang on, what are we doing? What is this? I’m not pointing fingers or blaming anyone other than myself but maybe at that point I should have said no. But I didn’t. I went on and on. And then, of course, the inevitable happened. Alcoholism, addiction. You know, I had to do a lot of those dinners and parties. I never was comfortable with that. I’m really shy. And then you need the Valium to stop the shakes so you can do the fittings and then you need the sleeping pills because you can’t sleep. Your world gets smaller and smaller. Finally: boom. You’re like this outcast. Silence. No one rings. I can’t describe it. (Gorton 2016)
As the preceding paragraphs indicate, there is a resource-related paradox for individuals managing professional brands while holding prestigious posts. On the one hand, such posts provide access to resources—which can be likened to field-level forms of cultural capital (cf. Bourdieu 1986)—that would otherwise be simply impossible to obtain. On the other hand, the demands of prestigious posts may be such that other resources—specifically those related to “bodily capital” (Waquant 1995)—and that are critical to preserving or advancing an individual’s professional brand may be seriously diminished. In field theoretic terms, the accumulation of field-level cultural capital during the course of a prestigious post may come at the cost of a person’s bodily capital. This finding complements research on human vulnerability in person branding (Fournier and Eckhardt 2019), suggesting that the very processes that contribute to a professional brand’s accumulation of valuable forms of resources may be intrinsically interlinked with the depletion of others. This paradox is compounded by a second tension that we identified through our analysis.
Individuals attempting to manage their professional brand in the context of a prestigious post also encounter identity-related tensions. This refers to the paradox that arises because prestigious posts tend to both enhance and dilute a professional brand’s identity. On the positive side, an affiliation with the heritage house can enhance the status of the creative director by endowing them with symbolic capital, or prestige and legitimacy, within the field of high fashion (Bourdieu and Delsaut 1975; Rocamora 2002). Creative director positions at premium ateliers are regarded as “coveted” (Winser 2013) because of the luster associated with these storied houses. For example, commenting on his prior appointment as creative director of Versace, Saint Laurent creative director Anthony Vacarello stated: You know when you are someone like me, you come from Belgium, you are not from here.…It was really wonderful. Because you realize that anything is possible. That’s what is beautiful about this job, that even if it’s hard and there is a lot of work, you can be recognized. People can appreciate what you are doing. (Michault 2016) I was attracted very much to go to that kind of scale because of its big business, because of the size of the turnover, because of the reach…. I think that it started to annoy me at one point that people always kept thinking that I was only interested in the niche and conceptual and the highly intellectual and the arty. Yes, I’m interested in all that, but it almost seemed, at one point, a challenge to reach out to more people. (Amed 2015)
On the negative side, however, holding a prestigious post at a heritage house can also dilute the distinctiveness of an individual’s professional brand in this same field, thereby diminishing their field-level symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1986). In the case of the fashion field, this can occur because the creative director is expected to honor the codes of a heritage house: “for designers at the helm of iconic global fashion houses like Dior and Saint Laurent, consistency, clarity and respect for the brand’s codes and heritage are critical” (Neuville 2012). And in honoring the codes of the house, the individual may need to set aside the codes associated with their own professional brand. This idea is well-reflected in a comment made by Natacha Ramsey-Levi during an interview when she took up the job of creative director at Chloé. She told her interviewer: “When I think about Chloé, I think about very delicate blouses, something that is pretty sophisticated.” Questions of how her futuristic design principles will evolve to incorporate Chloé’s lightness of spirit are immediately dismissed: “I am not doing Natacha’s brand, I am doing Chloé’s brand.” (Pithers 2017) It was around that time that I heard people saying, “Your style is so Balenciaga now, it’s no longer Nicolas Ghesquière, it’s Balenciaga’s style.” It all became so dehumanised. Everything became an asset for the brand, trying to make it ever more corporate—it was all about branding. I don’t have anything against that; actually, the thing that I’m most proud of is that Balenciaga has become a big financial entity and will continue to exist. But I began to feel as though I was being sucked dry, like they wanted to steal my identity while trying to homogenise things. (Wingfield 2013)
Further, individuals who take on prestigious posts in heritage houses may sometimes experience identity-related tensions linked to the ongoing demands of balancing the logics of art and commerce (cf. Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). To be clear, creative directors who take such posts know that they are hired to help the house balance commercial and artistic logics, and they recognize that they themselves are not artists per se. For example, in a recorded interview, Marc Jacobs explained that while being a fashion designer entails belonging to the creative field, “it is a job, whereas being an artist isn’t” (Prigent 2007). And John Galliano expressed similar views, answering a journalist who asked about “the clash between big business and art,” he stated: “I am not an artist” (Thomas 2015, p. 173). Nonetheless, over the course of a prestigious post, a creative director may experience tensions because striking the right balance between art and commerce for the house can, from time to time, entail more commercial emphasis than the person perceives is desirable given the professional brand they are attempting to preserve. Recall that Raf Simons was quoted previously as saying that he valued the opportunity to work for Dior because of its “scale, because of its big business, because of the size of the turnover” and expressed annoyance that “people always kept thinking that I was only interested in the niche and conceptual and the highly intellectual and the arty.” Yet in another interview, Simons reveals that he occasionally struggles, on the one hand, to meet the financial obligations of his post, and on the other, to express his own creative vision: Does he [Raf Simons] feel…that the power of the individual can still come through in a major fashion house? The answer is not so straightforward, he says, because there will always be commercial responsibilities you can’t ignore.…Raf says, “I am not able to express myself the full way I would wish to. I would be more extreme.” (Horyn n.d.)
As our analysis indicates, then, working in a prestigious post can trigger identity-related tensions in addition to resource-related tensions, and that a similar trade-off between forms of capital occurs. On the one hand, an individual’s professional brand may gain additional symbolic capital as a result of holding a prestigious post. On the other hand, the professional brand may become diluted and lose brand equity as a result of conforming to the demands of the prestigious post. It should be acknowledged, however, that some individuals may be less concerned with others in regard to the dilution of the distinctiveness of their professional brand. For example, Pierpaolo Piccioli, who has served as creative director at Valentino for more than a decade, talked about his decision to continue working for the house: There have been opportunities [to work elsewhere] and maybe you like them, but Valentino, I like it the most…. Besides being a wonderful company, I feel at home, I feel it’s mine. It’s important for one’s aesthetics to fit with the brand. (Zargani 2016)
For those who experience resource- and identity-related tensions, however, deploying tactics to mitigate these tensions is likely to be viewed as necessary. In the following section, we focus on practices that can be conducive to mitigating these tensions effectively.
Practices Conducive to Mitigating Tensions
Through our analysis we identified several practices that appear to be conducive to mitigating the tensions associated with prestigious posts while enhancing professional brand. To be clear, mitigating practices do not fully resolve tensions; rather, they reduce or ameliorate the tensions to some extent. These practices range along a continuum from being oriented internally to the field of the company at which the individual is currently employed to being oriented externally to the broader institutional field or market. They also vary in the extent to which they address the tensions triggered when professional brands work prestigious posts.
One practice that is largely internally oriented consists of “transporting teams” to support the professional brand. We define this construct as continuously surrounding oneself with a trusted team of individuals who can help the professional brand perform effectively in a manner that is consistent over time and across organizational settings. Several creative directors in our sample exhibited this strategy. For example, when Raf Simons took up the creative director role at Calvin Klein, media coverage of his move noted: The modern designer does not operate alone. When he is poached from one house by another, he installs a coterie of friends around him in his new workplace, but those bold headlines trumpeting his arrival rarely mention the importance of this traveling entourage. The recent case of Raf Simons’s appointment at Calvin Klein is a prime example. He made Pieter Mulier…with whom he has worked since 2002, Creative Director, and Mulier’s boyfriend, Mattieu Blazy, Design Director of Womenswear; he enlisted the services of photographer Willy Vanderperre whom he has known since his 90s Antwerp club days to continue to shoot his ad campaigns, and Vanderperre’s boyfriend, Olivier Rizzo, to style them; he brought in L.A. artist Sterling Ruby with whom he has a 10-year friendship and set him to redesign the Madison Avenue Calvin Klein flagship store. (Mallon 2017) I’ve built a team of collaborators around me. When you’re able to have a good group of collaborators around you, it really makes a difference. I have people who have been working with me for more than 10 years, who started with me at Fendi. When you establish such relationships, you don’t always need to say the same thing thousands of times because we understand each other in a very quick way. (Bailey 2014)
The practice of transporting teams has the potential to help buffer the professional brand from some of the tensions related to resource depletion. So long as the professional brand can rely on team members to help them do their job, they can maintain the continuity of practices they are familiar with and rely on their team to defray some of the demands on their time. As one of the industry insiders we interviewed explained when discussing how Bouchra Jarrar had brought a team with her when she took up the creative directorship at Lanvin: “most of the time they (creative directors) want to bring their own people because [they are] a resource to maintaining a routine rather than constantly changing.” Of course, some adaptation will always be required, because individuals cannot be completely indifferent to the institutionalized expectations internal to the organization that employs them (e.g., Kraatz and Block 2008), but the transported team can reduce the rate and extent of adaptation required.
A second practice that is both internally and externally oriented is “out-conforming to commercial logics.” We define this construct as working to exceed expectations related to the commercial logics which (as mentioned previously), are valorized along with artistic logics in fields such as heritage fashion (cf. Scaraboto and Fischer 2013). While creative directors who engage in this practice pay homage to the field’s artistic logic (e.g., by creating extremely creative couture collections), they simultaneously embrace the commercial logic (e.g., by assembling ready-to-wear collections and lines of accessories that are accessible both aesthetically and economically) such that the houses they work for prosper economically (Fernandez 2020).
It is clear that in the field of high fashion, both individual organizations and the industry as a whole value creative directors who can effectively grow sales of a brand. One creative director who has “out-conformed” in this regard is Hedi Slimane: In the four years that the designer served as creative director, Saint Laurent racked up double digit, year-to-year growth and is now a brand with yearly revenue of more than $1 billion. Slimane produced some of the industry’s most discussed and debated collections…. Slimane’s work at Saint Laurent—still widely called Yves Saint Laurent before he took over—helped spur a renewed interest in grunge. He was adept at taking the uniform of youth (at least as it is defined by a particular population of thin, mostly white, rock-a-philes) and up-marketing it. (Givhan 2016) Former Chloé designer Hannah MacGibbon, who began working at the label in 2001 before being promoted to creative director in 2008, was given three years to make her mark. However, Richemont executives grew impatient and installed Clare Waight Keller in 2011. Her commercial sensibility was viewed as a boon to the brand, increasing sales by double-double digits each year until they reached an estimated €450 million when she left for Givenchy in 2017. (Sherman 2019)
The practice of “out-conforming” is to some extent consistent with strategies identified in earlier work on professional brands who succeed by complying with occupation-conforming behavioral expectations (Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013). However, our analysis here builds on that research to suggest that for individuals endeavoring to preserve or build their brand equity while employed in a prestigious post, the key is to understand those expectations that are institutionally pervasive rather than organizationally specific and to invest their energies in ensuring that their performance on these pervasive normative expectations is outstanding. Further, we argue that out-conforming to commercial logics can help address resource-related tensions since ensuring a prestigious brand’s commercial success means that the resources the house provides to its key talents are maintained or increased. This point is nicely illustrated by Frida Giannini when an interviewer stated: “You said you don’t consider yourself an artist.” She replied: To me, art is not something that after six months you change. That’s why I say I’m not an artist. I need to try to sell every single collection to make it a success…. At the beginning of the crisis in 2008, when all the companies were collapsing, many people lost their work. There were people accusing me of doing a commercial collection. You know what? We didn’t fire one employee, and we have thousands of employees all over the world. What does that mean, commercial? It means it sells, and that’s important to me. (Wilson 2011)
A third mitigating practice that we identified through our analysis is “selectively neglecting local normative expectations.” Of course, professional brands will be contractually obliged to perform in specific ways that reflect the institutionalized expectations of the organizations for which they are working. However, there are likely to be more tacit expectations of which they are aware, but which they choose to neglect to protect or promote their professional brand.
In the case of the creative directors, this norm neglect is generally related to ignoring, rather than conforming to, the codes of the house. Marc Jacobs was explicit about his defiance when he introduced a collection of bags that deviated from the norms of the house during his tenure at Louis Vuitton: My name isn’t Louis Vuitton.…I basically broke the rules. I was told point-blank that I couldn’t change the canvas or do anything to it. And I got fed up with doing what I thought would please the head of communications. I got tired of playing by the rules. And I thought, the only time I’ve ever made a difference, and the only time anything ever changes, is really when you’re respectful and disrespectful at the same time. Just as I’d been fired for the grunge collection I did at Perry Ellis, I thought, Whoa, you know, this is what I think we should be doing, and we’re going to send it out anyway.…There was a different president here at Vuitton, and a different head of communications. But the press responded so well, and there was such fervor for these bags. They were knocked off immediately. So I forced the company into getting behind something that they didn’t want me to do in the beginning. It was the public that really said, “This is what we wanna see. This is what makes an old thing that our mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers and great-grandparents carried into something that we actually want now.” (O’Brien 2008)
Phoebe Philo is another example of someone who deliberately neglected norms of the houses in which she worked, in favor of featuring their own creation vision. As one reporter said: [In] 2008, when LVMH handed the reins of Céline to Phoebe Philo, [she] rejected any lip service to “brand DNA” and washed the company’s Aegean stables clean. Overnight the products created by the former designer Ivana Omazic were removed from the stores and Ms. Philo remade the brand in her image. It worked. (Friedman 2016) When I was deciding whether or not to take the job at Céline, I didn’t really look at the history of the house.…I also felt: it’s really not relevant to me what Céline has been or where it has been. It will be whatever I make it for the time I’m there. (Friedman 2010)
While conformity may please employers, it does not necessarily attract the positive attention of journalists, the public, and future potential employers. In the case of Phoebe Philo, for example, her disregard for the codes of Celine have earned her a loyal following who covet the pieces she created while at the house (e.g., Coscarelli 2018; Old Céline 2018) and fueled anticipation about what post she might next agree to take on (e.g. Friedman 2017). Thus, selectively neglecting normative expectations local to the organizational field may help build professional brand equity so long as the behavior which defies organizational norms is consistent with broader field level expectations.
A final mitigating practice involves “materializing the professional brand in the broader market.” We define this construct as creating and publicly circulating digital or material artefacts that instantiate the individual’s professional brand but that are not sponsored by the organization that employs the individual. This is an externally oriented tactic that is primarily relevant to addressing the identity-related tensions facing professional brands in prestigious posts.
One form this practice takes is continuing to run an entrepreneurial label affiliated with the professional brand while working in the prestigious post. For example, Alexander Wang engaged in this practice and managed to be relatively successful in growing both brands at the same time: “Judging by the numbers, [Wang’s] decision to do two brands has been productive. The Alexander Wang company has been growing by approximately 20 percent a year for the last three years, had 2013 revenues of just over $100 million and will have 20 stores globally by year end; in 2015, it is to open its first free-standing European store, and largest store over all, in London. Meanwhile, Balenciaga is also experiencing double-digit retail growth, Mr. Pinault said.” (Friedman 2014)
It must be acknowledged that the demands of running one’s own entrepreneurial label while also holding a prestigious post can exacerbate the depletion of personal resources. Wang indicates as much stating: “Right now I don’t have kids, I don’t have a dog.…At some point maybe I will want more of a personal life, or I will think, ‘I just can’t get on that plane again’” (Friedman 2014). Despite the demands on the individual’s time, however, many of the creative directors in our sample chose to lead their own labels while holding prestigious posts. And it appears that their rationale for doing so was directly related to maintaining their professional brand identity. For example, Raf Simons argued that “being a creative director in a huge institution is: you enter, and you’re going to go out.” In the same interview, given six months after he announced he was leaving his post at Dior, he reminded readers how the style and codes of a house are never the creative director’s “own personal codes,” emphasizing “how different these two are.” He further offered that with his own label, RAF SIMONS, he had “become very protective…doing literally what I want to do, that relates to its own history or my own history or my own being” (Milligan 2016). As this quote indicates, continuing to invest time, energy, and money in an entrepreneurial label is one way of “protecting” a professional brand.
Less demanding forms of the materialization practice were also observable in our data. Most notably, many of the creative directors used social media posts to express their professional brand identity to the broader institutional field. Alessandro Michele, for example, “owns dozens of funeral rings, and he has posted images of some of them on Instagram.… [He explained to a journalist that] “I feel that, as an artist, the big point is to share, and to let people think about what you are showing.…Sharing isn’t anything that scares me. My house, my life, my way to live, for me is kind of a masterpiece’” (Mead 2016). By referring to his ring collection in particular and his house and life in general as a “kind of masterpiece,” Michele indicates that he is using social media posts to instantiate his own personal creativity.
Another example of using social media to materialize and differentiate the professional brand in the broader field can be seen in the case of Nicholas Ghesquière. Having established an enviable track record of commercial and creative success at Louis Vuitton, Ghesquière took the liberty of using his personal Instagram account to publicize his disagreement with allowing the 45th U.S. President to attend a ribbon cutting ceremony for a new plant being opened by his employer (Friedman 2019). While such a move could be risky for someone who had done less to prove his value to the house, for Ghesquière, it reinforced the distinction between his professional brand and that of the heritage house that currently employs him and further raised his visibility within the wider institutional field.
Field theories again help us interpret this materialization practice by drawing attention to the distinctions between the local organizational field in which a person is currently employed and the broader industry field in which the professional brand must be visible and differentiated. And although prior person branding research has been silent on this distinction, our analysis suggests it is critical to understanding how individuals maintain career mobility.
Discussion and Implications
On three occasions in your life the problem of marketing yourself is of the greatest personal importance: first, when you leave school and are about to begin your career; second, when the job you have held has vanished; and third, when you already have a job but want a better one. — Twedt (1964, p. 73)
As the foregoing quotation indicates, marketing oneself to gain or improve existing employment is not a new phenomenon. This article extends prior work on professional branding (e.g., Close, Moulard, and Monroe 2011; Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013; Zamudio, Wang, and Haruvy 2013) by addressing challenges that individuals face when managing their professional brands to ensure their career mobility while employed in a prestigious posts that give them a high profile, both internally in the organizations they work for and externally in the broader institutional field. In doing so, we identified two types of tensions: the first concerning resources and the second identity. In relation to these tensions, we also found four practices that contribute to the mitigation of these same tensions, namely: “transporting teams,” “out-conforming to commercial logics,” “selectively neglecting local normative expectations,” and “materializing the professional brand in the broader market.” Importantly, we have argued that the tensions and practices we uncovered are tied to two sets of dynamics: one that affects the broader field in which the individual and his or her professional brand evolves (e.g. Parmentier, Fischer, and Reuber 2013), and another affecting the organization that offers the prestigious post. While prior work has theorized some of the implications of the tightly coupled commoditized person-brand for the company that bears his or her name (e.g., Dion and Arnould 2015; Fournier and Eckhardt 2019), studies preceding ours have not taken the perspective of the high-profile professionals who work for others in organizations embedded in institutional fields. This matters because how other field members regard an individual’s professional brand influences who might offer that individual their next post or provide them with resources to establish their own enterprise. Our work, then, complements the prior literature.
It is, of course, the case that the theoretical insights developed here may be transferable only to a subset of contexts. Specifically, our findings should be transferable to other areas with at least some comparable characteristics, such as that individuals are members of a high-status occupation in the institutional field of which they are members and are of high status within the organizations that employ them. For example, in our context, creative directors of heritage brands occupy the very top positions in the hierarchy of fashion, in comparison, for example, with the seamstresses who sew the clothes. A second characteristic is that high mobility is a field-level norm. In contexts where the mobility of those holding prestigious posts is limited by, for example, noncompete clauses, our theoretical insights would be less transferable. In contrast, our insights are particularly relevant in fields where the professional employment market is turbulent and movement between employers is common, or in fields where it is common for professionals to move back and forth between corporate employment and self-employment (e.g., consulting; Pagis and Ailon 2017). A third characteristic is that the occupation entails a considerable creative component that materializes in a distinctive “signature” or style such as that of a creative director in the high fashion context. Other creative fields such as architecture, design, entertainment, and some types of consulting share similarities with our context in this respect. It is possible that our findings may be transferable beyond contexts with these characteristics; for example, they may apply to academia. We would encourage future research on additional, conceptually differentiated contexts, to gauge the breadth of applicability of our insights.
Beyond extending prior theory on person brands, our work has implications for better understanding the complexities of affiliations between employees and the brands they work for. Complementing prior work grounded in social identity theory that suggests a person’s self-understanding of who they are can be enhanced by affiliation with a prominent brand (e.g., Tavassoli, Sorescu, and Chandy 2014), our work aligns with prior literature (e.g. Kipping, Bülhmann, and David 2019) which suggests working in a prestigious post can positively influence a person’s standing in the eyes of other stakeholders in a field. Moreover, by analyzing the practices of professional brands in prestigious posts through a field lens, we have surfaced hitherto neglected factors that may fuel, if not disloyalty to an employer, at least some efforts to limit the extent to which the professional brand is conflated or viewed as synonymous with that of the organizational brand that employs them. Our work can be seen as consistent with research that focuses on how individuals evaluate the external identity or signaling value of their affiliation with organizations (e.g., Frandsen 2012), but it goes beyond that work to suggest that individuals who are managing their professional brands while holding prestigious posts need to strike a balance between benefiting from the affiliation in the eyes of external stakeholders while maintaining their professional independence.
Our work also complements the burgeoning literature on occupational identity. Scholars have recently begun to understand that individuals may identify with the occupations they belong to rather than the organizations they work for (e.g., Pettit and Crossan 2020; Frandsen 2012) and that individuals frequently have multiple occupational identities (Leavitt et al. 2012). Our work complements this research and extends it by suggesting that identification with one’s own professional brand (which is different than occupational identification) may in some instances be a relevant factor that creates additional tensions for individuals who hold high-profile jobs in prestigious organizations. Such individuals may experience tensions, both between their organizational identification and their occupational identification and between their organizational identification and their professional brand identity. This tension is likely to be particularly acute in fields with employment turbulence, since becoming “over-identified” with an organization may limit a person’s opportunities for career mobility or for attracting resources to fuel an entrepreneurial start-up.
Implications for Individuals Managing Their Professional Brands
Our research also has managerial implications for individuals and their professional brands. First, with regard to tensions, we expect that the demands on personal resources will commence from the outset of the appointment to a prestigious post and continue over the duration of the tenure, whereas the challenges to the individuals’ professional brand identity are more likely to be experienced later in the post, as the corporate brand identity often begins to overshadow the professional brand identity only gradually. High-profile employees in prestigious posts must therefore engage in a balancing act between performing well for the organization and reaping the rewards of their performance, while avoiding ending up being completely “owned”—both at corporeal and brand levels—by the organization.
To succeed in that balancing act, professionals in prestigious posts will be likely to benefit from implementing resource-protecting mitigating practices, such as transporting teams, from the very outset of their employment. Those who have less well-developed teams when commencing a prestigious post will likely need to exert efforts to build them early in their period of employment to avoid resource depletion. And teams, once assembled, will need to be continuously nurtured and respected so that they will be willing to follow individuals from post to post. Once a “protective” team of people who are effective in their jobs and loyal to the individual has been formed, it will be important to take full advantage of the resources that the prestigious post provides, so that professional brand equity can be further burnished. It will be particularly useful to draw on these resources to ensure that the individual’s professional brand is seen, internally to the organization and externally in the wider field, as one that is associated with considerable commercial success. Though they cannot completely disregard other field-dominant logics, professional brands in prestigious posts are most likely to become or remain relatively powerful within the organization, and relatively mobile in the field, only if they honor commercial logics. And as successful commercial performance is demonstrated, an individual will be likely to have more leeway to selectively neglect local normative expectations and to materialize their professional brand in the broader market. While such practices might invite censure from an employer at the outset of a prestigious post, once an individual’s professional brand has a successful track record of commercial performance, employers are likely to be more tolerant of practices that primarily support professional brand building.
The generalizable precept here is one of timing: a person brand’s successful mitigation of a prestigious post is likely to require a sequenced approach starting with establishing the conditions for success internally and moving toward a measured distancing from the employer. Of course, those who deeply identify with their employer, and who trust they will be employed for much of their career by this employer (e.g., Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino), may prefer to refrain from mitigating practices that differentiate the professional brand from the prestigious post. However, in industries characterized by employment turbulence, such loyalty may be a rare luxury.
Implications for Organizations Offering Prestigious Posts
Clearly, organizations may sometimes wish to precipitate turnover in key personnel to refresh the brand (Godart, Shipilov, and Claes 2014). However, given that organizations invest significant resources in recruiting and publicizing the hiring of key talents, and that they entrust these talents with managing key aspects of the corporate brand, it makes sense to approach the relationship in a way that works to the mutual benefit of the employer and the person entering the prestigious post. In effect, organizations should regard their relationships with key personnel who hold prestigious posts as akin to a cobranding alliance (Parmentier and Fischer 2015) which both parties benefit from, even if the alliance is not a permanent one (Kupfer et al. 2018). This strategy is consistent with cobranding research that highlights the high visibility of these alliances to stakeholder audiences (Cunha, Forehand, and Angle 2015), though they can vary in the degree of integration between the brands that ally, the duration of the alliance, and the exclusivity of the arrangement (Newmeyer, Venkatesh, and Chatterjee 2014). It would also be consistent with treating person brands such as celebrity endorsers as cobranding partners (e.g., Seno and Lukas 2007, Wilcox and Caroll 2011) and would recognize that an organization’s reputation is affected not only by the performance of the person while they hold a prestigious post, but also by that person’s standing in the broader institutional field after that particular post is over. Put simply, organizations’ reputations are better served if those who have worked for them continue to prosper in their careers both during and after their employment in the organization.
This approach requires that organizations recognize that their employees must manage their own careers in a way that facilitates their mobility. This does not mean that employers should monitor key personnel for signs of disaffection or disloyalty; rather, it implies that organizations should anticipate that key employees will need to continue to invest in their professional brands even while supporting the corporate brand. If firms seek to maintain a key employee for some period of time, it will be in the organization’s interests to help these employees cope with the tensions that come with maintaining a professional brand. This may mean decreasing some of the personal demands that employees face or offering them effective ways of dealing with these personal demands. It may also mean relaxing organizational expectations that employees conform to internal norms and giving leeway for individuals with professional brands to invest some of their time in outside activities. Clear communication about parameters of acceptable activity both inside the organization and beyond can facilitate a productive relationship between the organization and the individuals employed in prestigious posts.
Conclusion
This article offers insights that are timely in an era when people must be ever more attentive to managing their career mobility and entrepreneurial options, considering that people who hold prestigious posts must always be ready to seek their next opportunity (cf. Godart et al. 2015; Kipping, Bühlmann, and David, 2019; Wang, Gupta, and Grewal 2017). We hope our study helps those managing their professional brands in these precarious times. While our research sheds light on mobility, it would be useful for future research to offer insights on why some professional brands remain in the same prestigious posts for the majority of their careers. Such work could usefully advance our understanding of not only professional brands, but also the employers (e.g., heritage houses) they work for, who must manage both opportunities and challenges associated with key employee turnover (cf. Moorman and Day 2016). Research on these topics could help improve not just the completeness of our theories but also the quality of the working lives of many.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, WEB_APPENDIX_conditional_accept_PDF - Working It: Managing Professional Brands in Prestigious Posts
Supplemental Material, WEB_APPENDIX_conditional_accept_PDF for Working It: Managing Professional Brands in Prestigious Posts by Marie-Agnès Parmentier and Eileen Fischer in Journal of Marketing
Footnotes
Notes
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the participants in seminars at Royal Holloway, Université de Lille, University of Innsbruck, London College of Fashion–University of Arts London, University of Arizona, University of Wisconsin–Madison, and the Chicago Consumer Culture Community (C4), as well as Daiane Scaraboto, Ela Veresiu, and Andrew Smith, for their valuable feedback. They also very much appreciate the constructive contributions of the JM editorial team.
Associate Editor
Amber Epp
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The financial support from SSHRC Canada’s Insight Development Grant is gratefully acknowledged.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
