Port marketing from a multidisciplinary perspective: A systematic literature review and lexicometric analysis

This paper aims at a systematic analysis of previous academic research on port marketing. First, we posit that port marketing is multidisciplinary by essence, and we analyze whether our assumption is reflected in the academic literature. Second, this paper aims at identifying the theoretical foundations of port marketing in the academic literature. With these two objectives in mind, we first conduct a large systematic literature review, and we identify 369 relevant academic publications over the last 40 years. Second, we implement an automated content analysis - a lexicometric analysis - on the 369 identified articles dealing with port- and marketing-related topics to analyze whether a conceptual field linking port and marketing appears in the literature. Despite the large existing academic research dealing with port marketing, our results do not confirm the expected multidisciplinary embodiment of port marketing (e.g., involving combined work done by researchers from both (per se) independent fields). Hence, considering (theoretical) concepts from the domain of marketing management research might leverage further research on the value creation done by ports. Moreover, our lexicometric analysis highlights the lack of a clear theoretical foundation of port marketing as a holistic concept. We conclude in proposing a pathway towards such a framework and outline specific topics for further research to foster such a holistic port marketing concept.