Employees as Animate Artifacts: Employee Branding by “Wearing the Brand”

Fueled by and fueling a larger cultural trend toward consumerist notions of social relationships is a hot management fad: celebrating the power of brands and recommending marketing concepts and branding practices as tools for general organizational management. An initial wave of advice on expanding branding as a marketing tool (e.g., Pine & Gilmore, 1999) is now giving way to arguments for organizations themselves to become brands. Under the rubric of “Living the Brand” (Ind, 2001; Pringle & Gordon, 2001), these arguments go beyond advising organizations on how to create brands to recommending that organizations apply branding practices to themselves (S. M. Davis & Dunn, 2002).