Since the early 1980s, extreme sports has surged from a niche, mostly subcultural phenomenon to become one of the most profitable industries in the sports business, generating exceptional revenue every year and attracting millions of participants and spectators worldwide.

What are the reasons for this phenomenon? An accepted explanation suggests that the emergence of extreme sports results from the interplay of various sociological, psychological, cultural and economic factors (e.g., Bennett & Lachowetz, 2004; Breivik, 2010; Raggiotto & Scarpi, 2019). Complex and multifaceted, extreme sports appeared as a subcultural phenomenon, subsequently evolving into a mass phenomenon and, mostly recently, into a consumption phenomenon. From the point of view of academic research, they have long represented a relevant phenomenon for psychology and sociology (e.g., Lyng & Snow, 1986; Zuckerman, 1994). However, recently they have increasingly become a relevant domain for management and marketing research (e.g., Raggiotto & Scarpi, 2019). Such growing interest is primarily justified by the impressive growth and extent of extreme sports as a business. For instance, it has been estimated that more than 22 million consumers are actively involved in extreme sports (Triathlon Business International, 2014); extreme sports events are able to attract massive sponsors such as Red Bull, Monster Energy and Mercedes-Benz, and gather hundreds of thousands spectators (Forbes, 2014). Furthermore, the marketing strategy of some brands, such as GoPro, strongly associates their product with the domain of extreme sports.

However, despite the apparent managerial relevance of extreme sports and the recent, growing interest therein, marketing and management research still largely lacks theoretical and empirical analyses with which to interpret the key behavioral drivers of consumers of extreme sports. Such lack of contributions within the field of managerial sciences may be justified in the light of the fact that the extreme sports phenomenon has only recently gained huge business momentum (Raggiotto & Scarpi, 2019). Recent investigations in the field of consumer research have examined extreme sports participants from a sociocultural perspective (e.g., Canniford & Shankar, 2012; Scott, Cayla, & Cova, 2017; Woermann & Rokka, 2015). Notably, extreme sports participation has been the subject of abundant psychology research, delivering different perspectives on voluntary risk-taking and individual engagement in extreme activities (e.g., Brymer & Houge Mackenzie, 2016; Csikszentmihalyi, 2002; Laurendeau, 2006; Lyng, 1990, 2014; Zuckerman, 1984). Insights from psychology, combined with the more recent insights of consumer research, may suggest that the consumer dynamics encountered in extreme sports could differ greatly from those of traditional, non-extreme consumer settings (Puchan, 2005; Self, Henry, Findley, & Reilly, 2007), thus requiring particular effort from marketing and consumer research to develop specific frameworks to capture the unique drivers of such extreme consumers. Consumer research has recently begun to consider this topic (e.g., Scott et al., 2017) by proposing unique theoretical lenses through which to decipher consumer behavior concerning extreme sports.

This book aims to contribute to the scholarly debate on extreme sports consumption, complementing the consumer behavior literature on extreme sports, which is based on a sociocultural perspective, with a psychology-based investigation of extreme sports consumers, focusing on the managerial relevance of the phenomenon from the perspective of extreme sporting event organizers. In doing so, the book explores the consumption behavior of “extreme” consumers from an individual perspective, adopting a multi-method approach. First, the book proposes a novel theoretical background based on established psychological theories about the behavior of extreme individuals, extending and applying such insights to managerially relevant outcomes. In other words, it accounts for the impacts of the specific psychological drivers of “extreme” individuals on their consumption behavior, related, for instance, to key outcomes such as brand engagement, satisfaction, and reaction to advertising stimuli.

The remainder of this chapter is devoted to presenting the evolution of extreme sports from its humble origins into a global market phenomenon, as well as presenting the most relevant psychological perspectives on extreme sports.

The remainder of the book comprises three chapters, each addressing a specific, managerially relevant consumption phenomenon: