Positioning of low-urbanized territories based on self-identification: The case of Ukraine

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In the context of competition for limited resources for the development of territorial communities in Ukraine, the use of marketing tools in managing local development is becoming increasingly important. One of these tools is positioning. In the case of territorial communities, it is a communicative expression of their identity. This study aims to determine the positioning characteristics of small territorial communities in Ukraine (low-urbanized territories – communities with a predominantly rural population) in formulating their positioning criteria. The subject of the analysis was the strategic visions formulated in the long-term planning documents of low-urbanized territories. Descriptive information was evaluated and grouped using expert methods. It was determined that low-urbanized territories in Ukraine use a multi-criteria approach in the positioning process: the number of applied criteria reached 26 (an average of 6 criteria). Each of them is focused on specific target audiences – residents, investors/local businesses, and tourists/visitors (48% for each of the target audiences). At the same time, less than half of the surveyed communities (44%) position themselves as “territories of developed agriculture”. Since little research has been done on the positioning of territorial communities in the Ukrainian context, this study has contributed new knowledge in this field.

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    • Figure 1. Percentage of communities that applied positioning criteria that targeted a specific audience
    • Table 1. Characteristics of territorial communities by population and by type of their administrative center
    • Table 2. Application frequency of positioning criteria
    • Table 3. Frequency of use of economic criteria positioning, %
    • Table 4. List of positioning criteria per target audiences, %
    • Table A1. Strategic visions of the studied communities
    • Conceptualization
      Nazar Hlynskyy
    • Data curation
      Nazar Hlynskyy
    • Investigation
      Nazar Hlynskyy
    • Project administration
      Nazar Hlynskyy
    • Resources
      Nazar Hlynskyy
    • Supervision
      Nazar Hlynskyy
    • Writing – original draft
      Nazar Hlynskyy, Olha Hirna
    • Writing – review & editing
      Nazar Hlynskyy, Olha Hirna
    • Formal Analysis
      Olha Hirna
    • Funding acquisition
      Olha Hirna
    • Methodology
      Olha Hirna
    • Software
      Olha Hirna
    • Validation
      Olha Hirna
    • Visualization
      Olha Hirna