In business, branding is used to manage an individual’s or community’s perception of products or services. Because branding can change stakeholders’ view of both a geographical area and its elements, the process has become an integral part of approaches and mechanisms in territorial development programs. Place branding has been used in such a manner for more than two decades as an approach to developing rural areas in Slovenia, but its implementation and effects have not been comprehensively studied so far. Rural areas in Slovenia are thus an attractive “geographical laboratory” for investigating those topics. This dissertation treats place branding as a spatial phenomenon: it observes and evaluates the process in interaction with the geographical area. The aim of the dissertation is to study the spatial patterns and regional characteristics of the place branding of rural areas in Slovenia from the viewpoint of causes and effects. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used: a literature review, an online survey, a semi-structured interview, a method of presenting and discussing the results with stakeholders, qualitative data analysis using Atlas.ti software, and an infographic method. The results show that place-branding processes develop in interdependence with the socioeconomic, structural, and organizational characteristics of rural areas. The research identifies features that differ from the theoretical concept in the literature: in Slovenia, place branding usually contributes to the emergence of differences in territorial development instead of a spatially balanced developmental process; implementation of the process is dominated by sectoral rather than comprehensive orientation; and individual tasks and approaches are uncoordinated and poorly connected. Stakeholders are not motivated to cooperate, and this also results in the prevalence of top-down decision-making.
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