THE MARKETING OF THE LOCAL COMMUNITIES AS A TOOL FOR SUPPORTING THEIR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The sustainable development of the local communities represents a rathersensitive topic, that incorporates and integrates elements related to the both concepts:‘sustainable development‘, respectively ‘local communities‘. If an amount of marketing isadded, things tend to become more complex, and, definitely, more complicated. The paperintends to answer, based on the information already available in the literature, to thefollowing questions: what is a local community? What is the meaning of the sustainabledevelopment of a local community? Does marketing contribute to and support the sustainabledevelopment of the local communities? The answers to these questions are aimed to providethe appropriate background for defining the concept of marketing of the local communitiesand for the identification of the ways this concept may be employed in order to support thesustainable development of the local communities.