The Evolution of Maritime Tourism Marketing from Marketing 1.0 to 6.0: A Longitudinal Text-Mining and Structural Topic Model Analysis

Abstract

Maritime tourism is among the fastest-growing segments of the blue economy, yet the evolution of its marketing philosophy has not been examined systematically. This study applies Kotler, Kartajaya and Setiawan’s Marketing 1.0 to 6.0 framework to a corpus of 17,335 scholarly works on maritime tourism retrieved from OpenAlex (2000 to 2024). A theory-derived dictionary was operationalised in the quanteda R package, and a structural topic model (STM, K = 8) with publication year as a prevalence covariate was estimated to recover latent thematic trajectories. The Values era (Marketing 3.0) dominates the corpus throughout, holding 26 to 29 per cent of era-specific vocabulary and reflecting the sector’s dependence on heritage, authenticity and coastal community. The Consumer era (2.0) rose from 19.2 to 23.0 per cent and the Digital era (4.0) more than doubled from 8.1 to 17.8 per cent. The Technology era (5.0) reached only 4.4 per cent and the Immersive era (6.0) just 2.0 per cent by 2024, a structural lag of roughly one marketing generation behind the broader hospitality literature. The findings define an urgent eras 5.0 and 6.0 agenda for destination managers, cruise operators and researchers.