The marketing deficit in shipping

Shipping moves roughly 90 percent of world trade, and yet marketing remains one of the least developed functions inside the companies that run the ships. The evidence for this is consistent across the small body of academic work that has examined the question directly, and the most detailed account of it is recent.

In a 2026 study in the WMU Journal of Maritime Affairs, Plomaritou and Hadjiconstantinou surveyed Greek tanker companies twice, twenty years apart, to track how marketing is organised and practised. The first round, in 2005, drew fifty responses, just over a third of the companies then operating. The second, in 2025, drew thirty, about a quarter of a market that had contracted from roughly 135 tanker companies to 119 over the period. Greece is a reasonable place to take this measurement. Its owners control one of the largest tanker fleets in the world, and the sample spans the full range from small private firms to large, professionally managed groups.

The structural finding

The headline result concerns whether these companies have a marketing function at all. In 2025, none of the small tanker companies surveyed operated a marketing department. Among medium-sized firms the figure was about a quarter, and among the largest, around 40 percent. The comparison with 2005 is itself revealing. Large firms stood at roughly the same 40 percent two decades earlier. The growth over the period came in the middle of the market, where medium-sized firms moved from no dedicated marketing to about a quarter having a department, while the smallest owners stayed where they began, with none. Where marketing did happen, it commonly sat inside the chartering department, with around half of firms in 2025 locating it there, handled by the people fixing cargoes alongside their commercial work.

The supporting systems show the same concentration. Adoption of a formal marketing information system, the apparatus for gathering and organising market intelligence, rose among large firms from 60 to 72 percent over the period, while staying negligible among small and medium owners. Marketing in this sector, to the extent it is institutionalised, is institutionalised by the firms large enough to carry the overhead and exposed enough to feel the need.

This is not a Greek peculiarity, nor a tanker one. Writing in the 2017 proceedings of the International Conference on Strategic Innovative Marketing, Athanasiou observed that marketing had been mostly disregarded in the academic literature on shipping and remained an underestimated component of the wider transport industry. Plomaritou herself has spent much of a career arguing that shipping marketing is a discipline in its own right, distinct from the generic kind. The two observations, a decade and a research tradition apart, describe the same condition: an industry that has professionalised almost everything except the way it presents itself.

Why the gap persists

Several features of the industry explain the pattern. Ocean freight is a derived demand, bought by charterers and shippers whose own margins are thin, which pushes owners to compete on rate and availability and to treat the service as undifferentiated. Much commercial contact runs through brokers, who sit between the owner and the end client and reduce the felt need for a direct brand. Ownership has historically been concentrated in private and family hands, where capital allocation favours vessels over shore overhead. And in strong markets the cost of weak positioning is invisible, because tonnage earns regardless of how the company is perceived.

The result is an inherited assumption that marketing is something other industries do. The assumption held for a long time because, for a long time, it was close enough to true.

What the firms that market now do

Among the companies that have built the function, the same study records a clear change in what it consists of. The sharpest movement is in the gathering of external intelligence. The share of firms collecting information on their competitors rose from 24 to 55 percent between 2005 and 2025, and the share monitoring the external commercial environment from 54 to 80 percent. Knowledge of charterer requirements and of a firm's own internal operations was already high in 2005, near or above 90 percent, which fits an industry that has always understood its customers and its ships. The recent gain has been in looking outward, at competitors and conditions.

The promotional toolkit changed in step. Digital promotion rose from 5 percent of firms to 87, environmental and sustainability campaigns from 7 to 85, and employer branding from almost nothing to roughly two thirds, while print advertising fell from a third of firms to a token presence. In the language of Plomaritou's framework of the eight Ps of the shipping marketing mix, the weight of effort sits where a safety-conscious charterer looks. Every firm surveyed used physical-evidence strategies tied to vessel performance and safety, nine in ten worked on the transport service itself, and only about a third engaged in price-based strategies at all. The marketing that exists in this market is built around reputation, compliance, and reliability.

A capability split

The picture is of a function that has modernised at the top of the market while remaining absent at the bottom. Large firms, carrying the reputational exposure of working with oil majors and listed charterers, have built digital and sustainability communications, market-intelligence systems, and in several cases dedicated departments. Smaller owners, who make up well over half the market by number, have largely none of this. The study describes the firms that have made the shift as moving from a purely operational entity into a strategically managed, market-oriented organisation, and it is the larger owners who have travelled furthest along that line.

The empirical base is modest, and worth stating plainly. The 2025 round rests on thirty self-reported responses, and the percentages are best read as the direction of travel. The precise figures matter less than the consistent gradient by firm size, which is hard to dismiss.

The practical reading

For an owner or operator weighing whether marketing warrants attention, the useful fact is the low base. An industry in which most participants have no marketing function is one where competent, consistent positioning is rare enough to be noticed. The field is far from saturated; what holds owners back is the inherited belief that the work does not apply to ships.

That belief is eroding from the demand side. Oil majors and large charterers now attach safety, environmental, and reporting conditions to the vessels they will take, which turns a company's reputation and the legibility of its credentials into a commercial input. The capability gap this study documents is, in effect, the lag between an industry's habits and its customers' expectations, and it is the customers who are closing it.