Tourist Branding of Russian Regions. Far East

The article is devoted to the analysis of tourist branding of macroregions of Russia. Using the material of open Internet sources, it examines the possibilities and limitations of branding individual historical and geographical macroregions of Russia, with the focus on the Far East. When analyzing branding practices, the systematic approach of A. I. Uyomov and I. V. Dmitrevskaya was used, based on which the concept of territorial branding is implemented within the framework of a variable structure dependent on local resources on a certain local substrate. The structure is the model used by brand managers for selecting elements and building connections between them. As a structural model, we used 9 bases identified by E. P. Marmilova and I. A. Sizova. In general, the essence of geobranding is quite simple - to make a certain territory recognizable beyond its borders to attract the attention of various target audiences in order to obtain various benefits. However, the discrepancy between the interpretations of the concept of a territorial brand in theory and practice and the different options for its definition required clarification of our approach. Therefore, as a working definition, we used the definition borrowed from I. S. Vazhenina, believing that a geobrand is a system of values associated with the uniqueness of a region that is widely known and causes constant demand from consumers. In Russia, several large historically established cultural and geographical regions can be distinguished. At the same time, almost everywhere they are divided into several subregions that are self-sufficient from the standpoint of branding. Since it is impossible to consider all attempts to develop brands for geographic regions of Russia within the framework of one article, we limited ourselves to an analysis of the practices of the Far East. We concluded that branding of macroterritories is difficult to implement due to the possibility of managing such a brand only from the federal center. Even the creation of the interregional tourism project «Eastern Ring of Russia» took more than ten years. The successful experience of the PressPass agency, which created several modern guidebooks, including “The Far East” and “The Arctic,” was discovered.