The issues of the development of thematic villages are mostly investigated in Poland, Austria, Lithuania. Village development theming is usually defined as a strategy or model. It acts as a vehicle for village renewal, enabling even small villages to develop successfully in the age of globalization. An experiential marketing strategy guides village development towards sustainability and helps to ensure integration between village environmental, economic and social development dimensions. Thematic villages play a heuristic role, they "push" locals and customers out of established spaces, village storytelling schemes, and encourage the search for alternative life, behavior and business models. This research aim was achieved: to determine the characteristics of the village theming development: thematic space, integrated (complex) consumption, co-creation, recreation, interests (needs), experience. Thematic analysis, collation and other methods of scientific literature were applied. Representatives of the various stakeholders must be involved in the village development theming characteristics package planning, management and control processes. There is a two-way communication between the development of various thematic objects in economic, social and environmental terms and the creation of a thematic space which must serve not only the interests of the visitors but also the inhabitants.

The paper discusses the possibility of smart thematic village development and presents the results of qualitative research aimed at determining why some smart thematic villages are developing while others are not. The grounded theory approach was used for semistructured interviews. This empirical study investigates four thematic villages in Lithuania, which have an official status and are currently operating and one non-developing thematic village. The structured grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, Corbin & Strauss, 2015 was employed to analyse the collected data using open, axial and selective coding techniques. The grounded theory of the thematic village development was built around the core category (a critical success factor of the development of a smart thematic village), i.e. weighed involvement of thematic village actors in thematic village activities context. The main condition of thematic village development is context for thematic village actors weighed involvement. This is context for theming, digital solutions to facilitate collaboration, communication, accessibility and problem-solving at various levels in the thematic village. Thematic village actors get involved in thematic village activities only when they have specific context -Global, National, Local institutional, Village Community and Individual. The more favorable the context, the more weighted involvement is and the more benefits thematic village actors and other stakeholders get, the more possibilities they create for sustainable smart thematic village development.