Effects of marketing strategies on competitive advantage (competitiveness) in logistics industry

Today, enterprises consider logistics as one of the most important competition criteria and in this context, they tend to outsource logistic activities. Together with this changing activity structure of the enterprises, increasing world trade volume and the formation of different trade areas such as e-commerce have increased the share of the logistics sector in the services industry. Competition also takes place at the global level in the logistics sector, where rapid growth and a global market structure is realized. With the increase of competition level, the alternatives of the enterprises that purchase logistics services and the changing demand structure from one enterprise to another have forced the companies operating in the logistics sector to observe their own processes in order to obtain sustainable competitive advantage (competitiveness). Of these processes, one of the most basic of these processes is the marketing process. When combined with the change in marketing structure and enterprise structures, marketing within logistics service providers can be said to be the most important in order to achieve sustainable competitive advantage (competitiveness). At this point there is an interaction between the enterprise's marketing strategy and competitiveness. Taking this interaction into account, businesses should build their strategies in a highly competitive environment. Organizational resources and capabilities that an enterprise has, are important inputs in the formation of a marketing strategy. In terms of competitive advantage (competitiveness), the most important outcomes are market performance and financial performance. In this research, the aim is to establish the interaction between the marketing strategy of the enterprises and thecompetitive advantage (competitiveness) . As a result of the analysis held with the data obtained from 42 questionnaires answered by mid or top level managers, it is concluded that in order to obtain competitive advantage (competitiveness) right marketing strategy has to be applied and to create a marketing strategy organizational resources and skills of the enterprise are important. On the other hand, another result is that the market performance and financial performance are the most important outputs of the competitive advantage (competitiveness) to be achieved. Although the logistics sector, which is the subject of the study and which is in the scope of the service sector, demonstrated a rapid development in recent years, the effects of the fact that the sector has not yet fully recovered from the traditional structure is observed in our country. Therefore in the study, in order to gain competitive advantage (competitiveness) and to apply marketing strategies so as to achieve this advantage, the points to be paid attention by the sector companies were pointed out. The conceptual model created in this framework includes organizational skills (Shared Vision, Communication Skill, Technological Response (Sensitivity) and organizational resources (Physical Resources, Financial Resources, Experiential Resources), which are important inputs of marketing strategy, in the first stage and service marketing mix elements (Product, Price, Distribution, Promotion, Participants, Process) in the second stage were defined and relationship between the two stages was evaluated. In the other part of the model, the interaction between marketing strategy and competitive advantage (competitiveness) and the interaction between competitive advantage (competitiveness) and outcomes of competitive advantage (competitiveness) , which are at the same time the indicators of enterprise performance (market performance, financial performance), take place.