Sport Consumer Behaviour

Marketing Strategies

Kostas Alexandris, Heath McDonald, Daniel C. Funk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138912489
• eBook ISBN: 9781317431510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

All successful marketing strategies in sport or events must take into account the complex behaviour of consumers. This book offers a complete introduction to consumer behaviour in sport and events, combining theory and cutting-edge research with practical guidance and advice to enable students and industry professionals to become more effective practitioners. Written by three of the world's leading sports marketing academics, it covers a wide range of areas including:

• social media and digital marketing

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• the segmentation of the sport consumer market

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• service quality and customer satisfaction

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• sport consumer personalities and attitudes

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• the external and environmental factors that influence sport consumer behaviour.

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These chapters are followed by a selection of international case studies on topics such as female sport fans, college sports, marathons and community engagement. The book's companion website also provides additional resources exclusively for instructors and students, including test banks, slides and useful web links.

As the only up-to-date textbook to focus on consumer behaviour in sport and events, Sport Consumer Behaviour: Marketing Strategies offers a truly global perspective on this rapidly-growing subject. This book is an invaluable resource for anyone involved in the sport and events industries, from students and academics to professional marketers.

Part 1
Introduction and consumer segmentation

Chapter 1
Introduction to sport consumer behaviour and decision-making

This chapter’s objectives are to:

• introduce the concept of sport experience design
• describe sport consumer behaviour and provide a definition
• discuss resources of time, money and effort related to sport experiences
• introduce a sport consumer behaviour decision-making model
• describe sport marketing actions.

1.0 Introduction

A fundamental purpose of any business is to maximize profits, mostly by designing and delivering products and services to meet the needs and wants of consumers. Sport organizations are not immune to such profit motives. Sport typically involves experiences that are largely considered subjective in nature and based on the interactions between individual consumers and physical environments. From a management perspective, the sport organization’s key function is to enhance such interactions in order to maximize the experience. From a consumer perspective, the sport interaction involves an individual’s psychological and physical responses, and includes beliefs, emotions and perceptions that occur before, during and after the use or anticipated use of a sport product or service. The focus of this book is on the consumer perspective, with an emphasis on understanding behaviour within the sport and recreation context.

A key benchmark for any sport organization is to provide a positive and pleasurable consumer experience. The fundamental assumption is that satisfaction with the sport experience will enhance consumer engagement. However, the psychological and physical features that contribute to this experience are less obvious. There is a general consensus among academic scholars and practitioners that sport consumers can be complicated to understand; they are often diverse, inconsistent, stubborn, emotional, selective, logical and prone to making irrational decisions. All of which makes predicting their behaviour somewhat challenging.

So, how does sport management construct the optimal experience to maximize profits? A difficult question to answer, but a good start is to focus on the design elements of the sport experience.

1.1 Sport Experience Design

The concept of sport experience design (SX design) represents the process of enhancing customer engagement by improving the use and pleasure provided in interactions between the customer and the delivery of the sport product or service. There are three main factors that influence SX design: the sport user; the sport context; and the sport management system. The sport consumer has psychological tendencies related to perceptions, personalities, desires and emotions, as well as personal characteristics related to demo graphics. For example, what motivates a 36-year-old female to wear a team logoed T-shirt while watching a basketball game. The sport context is the physical and virtual environments in which the specific sport behaviour takes place. For example, attending a live sporting event in a stadium or using a website to purchase a ticket or a sweatshirt. The sport management system is the process through which a sport organization creates and delivers the sport product or service to the customer. For example, the way a professional football organization stages a home game and manages the customer interactions via various touchpoints (e.g. website, media, parking, stadium atmosphere, employees and concessions). In combination, all three factors are important for understanding how to create the optimal SX design.

An example of this SX design approach is provided by Kaan Turnali (2014) in his five-part series entitled Fan experience matters: Design elements (http://forbes.com/sites/sap/2014/05/04/the-fan-experience-matters-design-elements/). Turnali used an SX design perspective to illustrate how the three SX design factors previously discussed relate to sport spectators and fans. He identified five key sport experience design elements that sport management should consider: 1) The fan experience should not be considered a one-size-fits-all proposition; 2) The fan experience can be both art and science; 3) The fan experience should be based on continuous engagement; 4) The fan experience is about making a special connection; and 5) The fan experience can be improved through continued research and evaluation.

Turnali stressed the importance of the consumer perspective in evaluating the design and delivery of the sport product or service. That is, a manager should examine the sport experience as a spectator or fan, and not as a professional working in an office. He proposed the use of the ‘empathy principle’ by sport managers to capture the essence of the customer’s journey as he/she interacts with various touchpoints, whether physical or virtual. This will allow a sport manager to get inside the head of the consumer and feel what it’s like to be that consumer as he/she engages in the sport experience.

The SX design perspective incorporates both sport consumer and sport management perspectives by focusing on the quality of interactions that occur. As a management responsibility, the process of engaging sport customers by improving the interactions between the sport consumer and the delivery of the sport product or service is critical. As a result, most sport organizations devote considerable resources to creating sport management systems and contexts to optimize the sport consumer experience and maximize profits. However, providing the optimal sport consumer experience can be challenging without understanding the perceptions, desires and emotions of sport consumers. There are a wide variety of personal, psychological and environmental forces that can influence sport consumer decision-making and behaviour. In order to assists sport managers, this book examines these forces and how they shape interactions with the delivery of sport products and services from a sport consumer behaviour perspective.

1.2 Sport Consumer Behaviour Background

Consumer behaviour as an academic field of study is generally considered a separate discipline from marketing. It emerged in the early 1980s from a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics and general education to examine consumption in many forms and contexts. Consumer behaviour is primarily concerned with investigating psychological and physical factors that influence an individual’s decision making, in order to explain or predict behaviour patterns (Schiffman & Kanuk, 2010). From this perspective, researchers seek to answer questions related to consumer behaviour to inform management practices. The answers to these questions are of value for the development of marketing initiatives by organization, to optimize the delivery of its products and services.

The study of sport consumer behaviour emerged as a subset of the general field of consumer behaviour within the sport management academic discipline. This divergence was largely based on the assumptions that sport has unique characteristics as well as a wider variety of products and services. These characteristic differences can include the intangibility and inconsistent nature of the sport product or service, the level of knowledge that sport consumers possess, the emotions created from watching or participating in sport, fluctuations in supply and demand, the manner in which sport is consumed in the presence of others and reliance on product extensions. A more detailed discussion of these characteristics appears in Chapter 2. In order to study sport consumer behaviour, researchers initially used knowledge derived from social psychology to explain why sport consumers attend or participate in sport events, use sport media and technology and purchase and wear sport merchandise. As the study of sport consumers continued to grow, knowledge from marketing and economics has been used to help explain sport consumer behaviour and decision making.

The various approaches utilized to study sport consumers highlight the complexity of explaining and predicting behaviour in the sports context. The sport consumer can purchase and use tangible and intangible products and services that have physical and experiential features. For example, purchasing and wearing a professional football team logoed hat; then attending a home match at a stadium and being part of an exciting crowd atmosphere when the team wins. In order to provide a foundation to guide our understanding, a useful definition of sport consumer behaviour is now offered.

Sport consumer behaviour is defined as the psychological and physical responses that occur before, during and after the use of a sport product or service. Psychological responses include perceptions, emotions and evaluations related to the sport experience; physical responses can involve physiological reactions of arousal and stress related to the sport experience. These psychological and physical responses can occur when searching, selecting, using and disposing of sport products and services (Funk, 2008). A fundamental principle of sport consumer behaviour is the desire to seek out and engage in sport experiences that provide benefits and satisfy needs and wants. This principle is illustrated by observing how sport consumers spend available resources of time, money and effort on sport experiences. A key point to remember in the study of sport consumer behaviour is that time, money and effort are finite resources. In other words, a sport consumer only has so much of each to devote to sport products and services.

• Time resources relate to the actual usage hours of sport that occurs in daily activities. The sport researcher can calculate the number of hours watching either a live sport event in person or via TV, radio, internet or mobile devices; participating in various sport and recreation activities, competitions and events; participating in fantasy leagues or tipping competitions; using the internet to follow a sport or using sport as a topic of conversation at work or at social gatherings. In addition, the time devoted to sport, recreation and event-related usage can affect other sport and non-sport activities. For example, being a professional football fan can reduce the amount of time devoted to active recreational sport participation or taking a child to the zoo. Similarly, training for a marathon event may require not playing golf on the weekends for a few months and giving up late night social entertainment. The level of attention devoted to sport also often impacts consumption behaviour not traditionally sport related. For example, individuals may decide on sport-related home decorating, food and dining, movies, clothing, education, automobiles and office supplies. Sport lifestyle purchases often occur among committed cyclists, rock climbers, as well as die-hard sport fans.
• Money resources reflect the financial commitment required to purchase and use the sport product or service. This can include the purchase of tickets to sporting events, club memberships, attending the sporting event, licensed merchandise, registration fees, sport equipment and subscriptions. However, decisions related to the individual’s budgeting capabilities need to be taken into consideration by the sport researcher as a consumer’s financial situation will impact his/her ability to use a sport product or service. For example, a sport consumer’s ability to purchase a team membership, season tickets or travel to a FIFA World Cup game will be determined by his/her amount of disposable income. Collecting financial information from sport consumers can provide researchers with purchase and usage levels in order to determine supply and demand of various sport products and services.
• Effort resources reflect both physical and mental requirements in order to use a sport product or service. Effort is particularly applicable in the context of participatory sports. For example, training for a marathon, participating in group exercise classes at a fitness club and playing tennis are examples of activities that require physical effort. The participatory requirements of each sport activity, in terms of the level of difficulty and the physical effort required, are factors which influence sport consumer decision-making and represent personal characteristics of the sport consumer (e.g. age, fitness level, skills). For a spectator, effort is also required. For example, waking up on Saturday at 8:00am and travelling to a sport venue to begin pre-game tailgating and festivities for a live soccer match at 8:00pm requires considerable effort and stamina. For both spectator and participant, mental effort is required in pursuit of using the sport product or service. This includes the amount of cognitive activity devoted toward thinking about purchase or using the sport product or service. Regardless of the context, the resource elements of time, money and effort are key indicators of what is important to a sport consumer, and help to understand how consumption decisions are made.

1.3 A Sport Consumer Dec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part 1: Introduction and consumer segmentation
• Part 2: Inputs: external forces and branding
• Part 3: Processes: internal psychological components
• Part 4: Outputs: sport consumer connections and satisfaction
• Part 5: An alternative perspective on sport consumer behaviour
• Part 6: Case studies
• Part 7: Topics of interest for sport marketing
• Index