Competitiveness and Place Branding: A Systematic Review and Comparative Analysis

Increased competition between territories highlights the need for a deeper understanding of the relationship between competitiveness and the brand of the territory as factors of sustainable regional development. The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between the categories “competitiveness of the territory” and “brand of the territory” through a comparative analysis of their content. The study uses a systematic review of the literature based on the PRISMA method in combination with retrospective, comparative and spatial analysis methods. The data was processed and systematized using Python programming language tools. The empirical basis of the study was 1972 scientific publications, including 690 articles by Russian authors selected from the database. eLibrary.ru and 1,282 foreign publications identified through Google Scholar, covering the entire research period without time limits. The results showed that scientific interest in territorial competitiveness began to form in the late 1970s, while research on the brand of the territory intensified only since 1998Comparative analysis identified eight groups of characteristics shaping the conceptual content of the studied categories, including socio-demographic, financial-economic, natural-recreational, administrative-political, cultural, infrastructural, innovative, and informational dimensions. The findings reveal that territorial competitiveness and place branding are largely based on an overlapping set of characteristics, however, place branding additionally incorporates associative attributes such as symbols, images, and identity. It was also found that, by 2020–2024, domestic and international studies had converged toward similar conceptual approaches to the interpretation of these categories.

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