The Role of a Luxury Brand for the Professional Competitiveness of Brazilian Business Women

This qualitative article explores the significance of a luxury women’s shirt brand in fostering the professional competitiveness of Brazilian Generation Y women. It does this by identifying the personal values that motivate women to wear these shirts, based on the Means-End Theory. This theory was operationalized using the Soft Laddering technique and complemented by non-participant observation. The result is that these shirts play a role in securing respect – primarily professional, but also personal – from third parties for the wearers, helping them to perceive themselves as successful in their careers. This study is the first to examine the ability of a conspicuous product to provide symbolic value to consumers, and it reveals the values of Brazilian Generation Y women that can enrich marketing tactics and thereby improve products and services aimed at them. This research contributes to the literature on status consumption by studying a category of conspicuous consumption not previously investigated in Brazilian academia in terms of its capacity to imbue symbolism in Generation Y consumers through the lens of personal values.