The Role of Marketing Capabilities in the Luxury Competitive Arena

This dissertation explores the role of marketing capabilities in the luxury competitive arena. The concept of the strategic competitive arena is a relatively new and hardly examined phenomenon in management research, which increasingly gains on importance on the background of intensified cross-industry competition and market dynamism (Day 2004; McGrath 2013). In my dissertation thesis, I turn attention to this phenomenon by specifically focusing on the strategic luxury competitive arena. Following the resource-based view of the firm (Barney 1991; Helfat 2007; Peteraf 1993), I show how companies competing in this strategic arena deploy arena-specific marketing capabilities in order to improve their marketing performance and achieve sustained competitive advantage.

Dr. Elena Ehrensperger is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Marketing of the University of Bern. She wrote her dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Harley Krohmer of the University of Bern. The focus of her current research lies on marketing and branding strategies in the context of luxury goods.