Investment Offer as an Expression of Marketing Orientation of Polish Local Governments in the Context of their Investment Attractiveness

The marketing concept of the functioning of territorial units is well-known today, both in the literature of the subject and in practice, although the activities undertaken vary in their intensity and scope. The expressions of marketing thinking and actions are, among other things, activities undertaken by local governments in the area of shaping the offer of a territorial unit. In our research, we focused on the territorial investment offer of the Polish local regions (NUTS 5), as well as actions taken by local governments as the entities with the most real opportunities for shaping this offer. The main goal of our research was the exploration of market orientation (MO) and investment offer (IO) in the practice of local governments, and then an attempt to link the undertaken actions with their potential investment attractiveness (PAI). The conclusions contained in this article are based on research conducted on a random sample of 277 Polish local regions with the use of three research methods: electronic audit of the official web portals of local regions, the mystery stakeholder, and an electronic survey sent to the official administrative representatives of the local regions in the sample.The conducted research shows that Polish local governments are slowly adopting MO, increasingly identifying their customers (including investors) and knowingly providing the expected benefits. As part of the conducted research a wide collection of good practices was developed in the area of shaping the investment offer and marketing approach which should be promoted and discussed.