Economic potential of the Volgograd region branding

Every year more attention is paid to improving the competitiveness of territories. In the context of the changes in 2020, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions, the leadership of most countries faced the need to strengthen the work to create a positive image of the territories not only in the minds of foreign consumers (investors and tourists), but also directly among the population of these regions. For the Russian reality, this approach is relatively new, which is due to the lack of scientific justification for the effectiveness of such a mechanism. To date, the practical implementation of branding tools has been applied to individual cities and regions. At the same time, the need to organize systematic work on positioning both the entire country and individual regions in order to expand sales markets and increase the competitiveness of domestic products has been repeatedly discussed at the state level. In 2019-2020, a comprehensive work was carried out in the Volgograd region to form the brand of the territory, which resulted, among other things, in the development of hypotheses for the region positioning, the analysis of which was carried out in this scientific study. The author believes that the proposed concept is quite objective and is justified by the resource capabilities of the region, but its implementation involves improving the infrastructure, as well as strengthening the information support of the economic transformations carried out in the region.