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.