MARKETING CAPABILITIES AND COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE OF TOURIST DESTINATIONS

Objective: This article aims to investigate in a given group of tourist destinations the potential effect of mediation of marketing capabilities (capacity for service innovation, branding capacity, hospitality, and customer relationship management) in the relationship established between the orientation for the market and the competitive advantage of companies in the hospitality sector and its influence on the competitiveness of the tourist destination Methodology: A survey was carried out in 8 tourist cities, totaling 472 companies in the hospitality sector. As the study's objective is to verify the relationship and mediation between constructs, the statistical technique chosen was Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Main results: The first result was to prove the relationship between market orientation and competitive advantage. it was then possible to empirically demonstrate that the capacity for innovation, branding capacity, hospitality mediate between the relationship between market orientation and the competitive advantage. Theoretical/methodological contributions: The main contributions of this article are to demonstrate the mediation relations of marketing capabilities (capacity for service innovation, branding capacity, hospitality, and customer relationship management) in the relationship between market orientation and advantage competitive.