Seaport marketing strategies and its impact on customer satisfaction

Abstract

In the world today, seaports play a crucial role in the economic and environmental sustainability of tourism destination. Seaports and their related facilities of different types and sizes are competing to capture market share globally. This study seeks to investigate the impact of seaport marketing mix strategies on customer satisfaction, identifying the significant marketing mix tactic that should be of focus to cities with seaports. This quantitative research uses deductive approach to develop a proposed model with various hypotheses to be tested. It is considered descriptive research as it seeks to depict the characteristics of a population being studied as well as to answer questions that pertain and explain seaport marketing strategies and its impact on customer satisfaction. Online questionnaires are distributed through convenience sampling during cross-sectional timeframe- December 2021 and January 2022. Results show that seaport-services, promotion, staff, physical evidence, and process has a positive significant impact customer satisfaction with the seaport. Seaport place/distribution and price are insignificant on customer satisfaction. This research is among ongoing attempts to study seaport marketing so to improve the current tourism industry of a nation. The focus is on seaport satisfaction, uncovering the significant marketing mix experiences to propose an effective marketing strategy. This research thus provides a significant addition to marketing knowledge for an increasingly important sector of the tourism industry, illustrating the vitality of the marketing mix and how the marketing mix elements vary from one field to another field.