The maritime marketing maturity gap

A comparison of two maritime firms offers a useful window into how unevenly marketing has developed across shipping. Šekularac-Ivošević and colleagues (2023), writing in the STED Journal, set the social-media presence of the container line A.P. Moller-Maersk against that of the ship manager Bernhard Schulte Shipmanagement. The distance between the two firms was large on every measure they examined.

The measured gap between a major and a manager

On Facebook, the container line carried around 3.05 million followers and published several hundred posts over the year studied. The ship manager held roughly 12,000 followers and produced around one hundred posts in the same period. The follower count alone separated the two firms by a factor in the hundreds, and the publishing cadence reinforced the same pattern. One firm operated a continuous, well-staffed channel. The other maintained a presence that registered as occasional.

Šekularac-Ivošević and colleagues (2023) related this gap to company size, public visibility, and digital maturity. A global container line reaches a broad public audience and has the scale to fund a marketing function that runs as a standing operation. A ship manager serves a narrower, more technical set of buyers and has historically treated marketing as a secondary activity. The comparison covers only two companies, so it stands as an illustration of a wider tendency, with no claim to measure the whole sector.

A long tail behind the averages

The value of the comparison lies in what it suggests about the firms that sit below the majors. The container lines that dominate public attention have built marketing maturity over years: dedicated teams, consistent output, and a presence that audiences encounter without seeking it. Much of the rest of shipping has not. Ship managers, offshore operators, brokers, and specialist suppliers occupy a long tail where digital presence remains thin, and sector averages conceal how thin it runs.

This pattern aligns with a broader finding that runs through the research on maritime marketing: marketing remains under-developed across much of the industry. The firms with the deepest pockets and the widest public footprint have invested, and their investment pulls the visible average upward. Behind that average sit a large number of operators whose channels look closer to the ship manager in the comparison than to the container line, publishing rarely and reaching few.

The open ground in a quiet field

For a firm in that long tail, the thinness of the field carries a practical consequence. Category authority in a sub-sector can be built at modest cost while competitors stay quiet. The barrier to a credible, consistent presence is low in absolute terms, and lower still relative to the budgets that the majors commit. A firm does not need the resources of a global container line to publish steadily, address the questions its buyers actually have, and accumulate a record that signals competence over time.

The advantage compounds for whoever moves first. In a field where most operators are hard to tell apart, the firm that establishes a clear presence early becomes the one a buyer finds when searching and the one a buyer remembers when deciding. Visibility, once built, is difficult for a late entrant to displace, because attention and search ranking tend to concentrate around the names that were already present. The early mover captures a position that quiet competitors leave open by default.

Reading the gap

The two-firm comparison from Šekularac-Ivošević and colleagues (2023) should be read for what it represents, with the precise figures left aside. It shows a structure that recurs across maritime sub-sectors: a small number of well-resourced majors with mature marketing operations, and a wide field of smaller firms whose presence remains underdeveloped. The majors set the visible standard, and that standard makes the silence of the rest of the field more conspicuous.

The marketing implication follows from the structure itself. The maturity gap is not fixed, and the ground behind the majors is open. Most operators in shipping have yet to build the kind of presence that the leading container lines now take for granted, which leaves room for any firm willing to commit a modest and sustained effort to occupy authority in its own sub-sector before the field fills in. The condition that makes the gap notable, a quiet field of underdeveloped competitors, is the same condition that makes it an opportunity for the firms still inside it.