Creating value through membership and participation in sport fan consumption communities

Abstract

Research question: While marketers acknowledge the critical role of developing long-term strategies that enhance the value of the organization, collaborative and co-creation service activities are gaining importance. At sporting events, sport team personnel collaborate with sport consumers to create the event experience. Sport consumers, however, rarely attend sporting events alone. Instead, sport consumers join and participate in networks of like-minded fans and engage in collaborative and co-creation consumption activities. In sports, these networks are called sport fan consumption communities. The purpose of this research is to create and test a hypothesized model of membership and participation in a sport fan consumption community and fans' behavioral intentions. Research methods: In total, 10 hypotheses were generated and tested using a sample of students and alumni (n = 627) from a large Division I-A (NCAA) university in the southeastern USA. Using confirmatory factory analysis procedures, reliability and validity evidence for 15 items measuring the 5 hypothesized constructs was found using approximately half of the data (n = 314). Subsequently, structural equation modeling with bootstrapping procedures was used to examine the direct, indirect (mediated) and total effects with the remaining data (n = 313). Results and findings: The empirical results supported all 10 hypothesized relationships. The results suggest that both a feeling of membership in the sport fan consumption community and participation in the rituals and traditions associated with the community independently and in coordination lead to increases in future intentions to attend the university's (gridiron) football team's games, purchase the team's merchandise, and recommend the team's games to others. Implications: For sport managers and marketers, resources should be allocated to support the creation and development of sport fan consumption communities in order to improve the relationships between fans and their team.

Keywords:

• service-dominant logic
• sport fans
• consumption community
• consumer behavior
• membership
• participation

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dr. Jeffrey D. James, Dr. Yu Kyoum Kim, and Dr. J. Joseph Cronin Jr. for their guidance, assistance, and support. The author would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and insight, in addition to the three guest editors for this special issue and the leadership of EASM which facilitated the opportunities in 2012 and 2013 to discuss and collaborate on the topic of value co-creation in sports.

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Office of the Provost, the Office of Research, and the Congress of Graduate Students at the Florida State University.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This research was supported by a grant from the Office of the Provost, the Office of Research, and the Congress of Graduate Students at the Florida State University.