Seaport competitiveness and customer value creation: the case of the port of Naples

Traditionally, seaports have been considered as interface from the maritime to the land stage and the provided services were oriented towards the satisfaction of shipping companies' requirements. In the current years, the increasing need to integrate seaport with its own productive hinterland, from one side, represents a crucial challenge that policy makers and business operators are facing with in order to guarantee a lasting economic development; from the other side, the effective integration of seaport in the international and local distribution and logistics chains depends more and more on immaterial resources such as the knowledge of the market and of customer's needs, the development of competences and the agility in reacting to the demand's changes, the sustainability of the growth strategies. Characterized by a myriad of supply chains, each of which represents a specific entity with particular logistics needs, port actors are called to identify those service attributes that increasingly satisfy customers' demand. Starting from the concept of customer value, the paper addresses the main gaps of the port literature and proposes a framework of analysis of port value creation drawing from the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm. From this perspective, seaports can be viewed as dynamic networks of actors that exchange resources, share knowledge and build supply chain capabilities for the pursuit of customers' satisfaction. In this network, resources allocation and interaction contribute to the value creation and the sustainability of the strategic choices in case the strategic aims of port operators converge towards customer's satisfaction. The paper discusses the contribution of resources to the customer value creation by analysing the case of the port of Naples.