Abstract

The ports’ management is facing the challenge of sustainable port development, considering several aspects: economic, technological, logistical, environmental, and community involvement. Although the numerous scientific concepts have been developed for explaining the trends of ports’ involvement into the logistics chains, this research work presents an attempt to draw the attention to the marketing aspect of the port mission, being focused primarily on the customers’ needs, whose preferences are the key factor in selecting specific port in competitive environment. Therefore, the Adriatic, Aegean, and Black Sea ports, sharing the unique marketing features and target market, have been analyzed with the aim to be mutually positioned. The considered ports have similar goals: to achieve the greater degree of competitiveness as well as to acquire the larger number of customers being attracted on the basis of superior port choice criteria. These circumstances have been explored through some distinctive quantitative and qualitative criteria by employing the appropriate, well known and structured quantitative PROMETHEE and AHP method. The obtained results are presented by perception maps, and described on the basis of gained quantitative indicators and the qualitative explanations given by the authors, primarily, in the marketing manner.

Highlights

  • Expanding the spatial and functional scope of their activities, modern ports represent significant logistical and industrial centers, but they are dominantly related to maritime transport (Noteboom, Yap 2012)

  • In a competitive environment, marketing as a concept and port business practice offers a wide range of solutions for achieving and maintaining competitive advantage, which could be expressed as financial and/or nonfinancial

  • Many methods have been used in order to define the factors of seaport competitive performance, but benchmarking is standing out as a method of the marketing positioning of the ports based solely on the comparison and the research aiming to determine, which port is the leader in the market

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Summary

Introduction

Expanding the spatial and functional scope of their activities, modern ports represent significant logistical and industrial centers, but they are dominantly related to maritime transport (Noteboom, Yap 2012). Ports are the elements of value – driven chain systems (Robinson 2002), i.e. seaports are the link without which, the two modules of transport – maritime and land could not be effectively connected. The variety of methods have been applied, many ideas and activities carried out in order to achieve the ultimate goal – to be more competitive in the port services market and to be chosen by users (shippers, forwarders, shipping companies, terminal operators, port authorities, government agencies, and other clients). Many methods have been used in order to define the factors of seaport competitive performance, but benchmarking is standing out as a method of the marketing positioning of the ports based solely on the comparison and the research aiming to determine, which port is the leader in the market. Many methods have been used in order to define the factors of seaport competitive performance, but benchmarking is standing out as a method of the marketing positioning of the ports based solely on the comparison and the research aiming to determine, which port is the leader in the market. Rugman and Verbeke (1993) applied the Porter’s Diamond in the case of seaports, concluding that a seaport position in the market is based on six key ‘diamond’ factors. Pando et al (2005)

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