A concept in search of a stronger foundation: Three ideal types of place brand architectures

Abstract

Besides a few extra mentions in case studies and conceptual articles, the concept of place brand architecture has received limited attention in the place branding literature. Moreover, the literature lacks a convincing theoretical foundation of the concept of place brand architecture. This lack of scholarly attention for the concept of place brand architecture is striking, because it means that we ('as scholars') have little knowledge about the different manifestations of place brand architectures. From a critical stance, it can even be argued that scholars have failed to scrutinise the scholarly question of under what circumstances a specific set-up of place brand architecture is most suited for a specific type of multistakeholder place branding campaign. To this end, the goal of this article is to contribute to the place branding literature by theorising on what the concept of place brand architecture entails, what the different dimensions of a place brand architecture are, and what ideal types of place brand architectures can be distilled from the literature. These ideal types, which, as the article shows, can also be observed in practice, may help future research to look with specific theoretical lenses at set-ups of place brand architectures.