The Impact of Regional Economic Conditions on Place Branding Results: The Survival Analysis Approach

Abstract

Place branding became a part of regional development processes; therefore, regional conditions could affect the place branding success. Nevertheless, studies on place branding success are mostly focused on management issues, and the role of regional conditions is yet to be revealed. In this regard, the paper aims to explore how regional economic (including social and spatial) conditions affect the results of place branding activity. We assumed that regional conditions have a certain impact on place branding activities, yielding better or worse place brands survival, which we treated as the fact of observable place brand attributes continuing to exist. To test this hypothesis, a survival analysis on brands of 15 Russian regions was performed for the period from 2010 to 2021. Using the Kaplan-Meier method, we examined the impact of seven variables on place brands survival. The obtained findings confirm the positive impact on brands survival of such variables as gross regional product (GRP) per capita, regional investment, and migration attractiveness. The following variables have a negative impact: unemployment rate, the adjacency to regions already having place brands. Additionally, place brands of regions with administrative centres in smaller cities have a better survival rate than the ones with bigger cities. Finally, the impact of change of the federal subject’s head on survival was not confirmed. Thus, the present article contributes to place branding studies by unveiling the influence of regional conditions on place branding outputs and extends the methods of place branding research by using the survival analysis.