Effective branding of the territory as one of the most effective tools in the competition of the regions

The study reveals the importance of the territory’s branding within the competition of the regions. The purpose of the article is to determine the brand’s impact of the territory on the attractiveness of the region. To achieve this goal, the description of global approaches is given in defining the categories "attractiveness of the territory", "brand of the territory", "competitiveness of the territory". The main approaches to evaluate the effectiveness of branding are identified and described. Detected that there is no single universal method for assessing the effectiveness of branding, but there are lots of approaches and each method can be effective for a certain purpose. To calculate if the brand value of the territory is strongly related to the country's success in the target markets, the article determines the correlation coefficient of the brand value and such indicators as a volume of investment in the territory, number of tourists, tourism income and export income. The calculation is based on such countries example as the United States, China, Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom. Indicators such as export income and the number of investments do strongly correlate with the brand value of the area, and tourism revenues are also closely related to the brand value. In addition, countries such as Norway or Finland are the leaders by the quality of life rank, but the brand’s value of these countries are lower than China’s one, where living standards are worse. It has been determined that the value of a brand reflects well the indicators of the development of the territory related to the economy, but not with social indicators. It has been proved that a positive result of branding is an increase in the indicators of the attractiveness of the territory and, as a result, the socio-economic growth of the region. Thus, the indicators of the socio-economic development of the region can also serve to assess the effectiveness of the branding of the territory. The understanding is revealed that the main purpose of branding is to induce the desire of target groups of people to choose a certain territory for travel, residence, investment or purchase of goods and services produced in this territory.