City branding as a tool for developing the territory competitiveness

Abstract

In modern conditions, the city brand represents a set of thoughts, feelings, and expectations that shape the territory's character, reputation, and value system. Creating a strong and recognizable brand for the city and region will ensure the growth of competitiveness and increase attractiveness for stakeholders, companies, tourists, and the population. The article aims to study the theoretical and applied principles of branding cities and territories as a component of their competitive development. The authors investigated the dynamics and features of scientific publications in the Scopus database on the topic of city branding using the Scopus Analytics toolkit, which allowed them to analyze the dynamics of publication activity and the main subject areas of research. The dynamics of the number of publications indicate a significant increase in scientific interest in the issues of branding cities and territories: compared to 2004, the number of publications has increased by more than thirty times. The analyzed subject areas of research testify to the dominance of the socio-economic direction of research, particularly social sciences, business, management and accounting, economics, econometrics and finance, and environmental sciences. As part of the study of scientific approaches to branding places and territories, the authors single out the key components of the system of its formation: place experience, place identity, place image, product offers, projected narratives and tourism. The systematization of branding strategies of cities and territories, which will ensure the competitive development of regions, made it possible to single out strategies for preserving the feeling of the city, developing iconic projects, organizing iconic events, developing the creative economy, and creating images of cities and territories through mass media. As part of the study of applied aspects of city branding, the authors studied successful examples of the implementation of branding in developed cities, particularly New York, Stockholm, and Dubai.