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Social media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.

Guided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.

Results highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.

Results provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.

A 30-item Sport Interest Inventory (SII) was developed and validated for measuring ten unique motives related to consumer interest at an international sporting event. Spectators (N=1,321) attending five different US venues during the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup were administered the SII. Analysis revealed that sport and team interest, excitement, supporting women's opportunity in sport, aesthetics and vicarious achievement explained 35 per cent of the variance in spectators' interest in the event. Results provide sport marketers with consumer-based marketing strategies, particularly for women's sport.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for solving the multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) problem in which the decision maker can provide the five types of attribute aspirations, namely: benefit type with requirements; cost type with requirements; interval type; benefit type; and cost type.

First, for each type of attribute aspiration, the calculation formula of utility values of alternative concerning attributes is given. Then, using the calculation formulae, the attribute values are transformed into the corresponding utility values. On the basis of this, the overall ranking value of each alternative is calculated. Further, a ranking order of alternatives can be determined according to the obtained overall ranking values.

Research shows that it is necessary to develop the method for MADM with attribute aspirations. The example shows that the proposed method is applicable.

The proposed method can be applied to the selection of wastewater treatment technologies or other areas.

This paper proposes a new MADM method with multiple types of attribute aspirations. It develops and enriches the existing MADM methods.

This paper gives a selective review on some recent developments of nonparametric methods in both continuous and discrete time finance, particularly in the areas of nonparametric estimation and testing of diffusion processes, nonparametric testing of parametric diffusion models, nonparametric pricing of derivatives, nonparametric estimation and hypothesis testing for nonlinear pricing kernel, and nonparametric predictability of asset returns. For each financial context, the paper discusses the suitable statistical concepts, models, and modeling procedures, as well as some of their applications to financial data. Their relative strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Much theoretical and empirical research is needed in this area, and more importantly, the paper points to several aspects that deserve further investigation.

Managing the growing word-of-mouth (WOM) of brand fans has become a new challenge for companies in the fan economy era. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of language intensity of brand fan WOM on customers' willingness to adopt WOM based on psychological resistance theory and to reveal the underlying mechanism of this process.

A research model was developed to test the proposed hypotheses. Two experiments were conducted on an online platform using data from 708 participants. The independent samples t-test and analysis of variance were used to analyze the data.

The results show that, in the context of WOM among brand fans, high-intensity language leads to a lower willingness to adopt than low-intensity language and threats to freedom mediate this effect. Moreover, the restoration postscript moderates the effect of language intensity on threats to freedom and customers' willingness to adopt WOM.

Unlike previous studies that focused on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) language content, this paper focuses on language intensity to reveal the psychological process of customers' willingness to adopt brand fan WOM. The findings not only enrich the research related to the language effect in eWOM, but also deepen the understanding of the influence effect on brand fan WOM, providing effective guidance for brands to manage fan WOM.

The purposes of this paper is to segment spectators of collegiate football game using a cluster analysis and to determine differences between spectator clusters based on motivations, satisfaction, and demographic characteristics.

A survey instrument was utilized, and a total of 407 usable data were gathered through a convenience sampling method at a main campus in the Southern USA. A discriminant analysis was employed to create cluster profiles including demographic variables not previously included in the clustering procedure. Cluster analysis is a procedure used to determine best group segmentation.

Through a factor-cluster analysis, two distinct groups are identified as attendees of collegiate football games: far-away fans and seasoned sideliners. Knowing the different spectators in event attendance allows marketers of collegiate sport events to effectively target segments and attract larger numbers of visitors to each event. Although the results indicated lower satisfaction with the far-away fans cluster, they are nonetheless spending their money at these events. A concerted effort to better welcome tourists that are supporting the visiting team may help boost their image of the local community and thus increase their spending level.

The current study adds to the literature on sport event research, while providing great insight for researchers and practitioners how to segment their target market. Therefore, it is believed that the results of the present study will help future researchers and industry practitioners make use of the implications and findings to broaden their knowledge about sport marketing.

This study aims to examine the “external effect” of a migrated star player on their domestic sport industries. By exploring the new aspect of star power, this study provides important insight and critical implication to many relevant stakeholders in the professional sports league. Particularly, this is critical under the recent circumstance where the globalization of sports products becomes the central strategic issue of the world-class leagues.

In this paper, the external effect of star players migrated from three Asian leagues (Japan, Korea and Taiwan) to Major League Baseball in the USA, the world-class baseball league, on their domestic league attendance demand was empirically investigated. For the analysis, comprehensive historical data from various reliable sources from each league were collected.

The findings of the paper strongly support the external effect of migrated stars significantly existing in all the three leagues. The effect is consistent across various measurements of migrated star players. More interestingly, the effect was found to be mixed across different leagues; for example, migrated star players increases in domestic league attendance in Japan, while it decreases in Korea and Taiwan. This indicates that the external effect of migrated star players depends on the characteristics of the domestic leagues. In addition, it was found that the external effect was substantial enough to compare to the effect of major demand drivers such as team winning, competitive balance and star power. For managerial implications, this study also provides revenue projections induced by the impact of migrated star players.

This study opens a new chapter related to star power topic and immediately calls for future studies regarding this external effect, particularly, theoretical and behavioral approaches.

Formal orientation programs play a potentially important role in newcomer adjustment, yet research aimed at understanding and improving the effects of these interventions has stagnated in recent years. The purpose of this chapter is to facilitate a redirection of researchers’ attention to such programs, and to suggest ways to integrate this body of research with recent developments in socialization and training literatures.

Over the past two decades the subject and growth of social media has been exponential, along with its relevance to the sport marketing industry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the strategic usage of social networking websites to develop the concept of a personal brand by international rugby union players.

This study was embedded within an interpretivist paradigm that allowed the qualitative examination of the way international rugby players use social networking sites. The primary data collection method involved ten semi-structured interviews and was triangulated with secondary sources which involved visiting the three social networking sites utilised by all the players (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram).

The research analysis revealed personal branding themes that can be classified according to the following mnemonic: personality, exposure, response, follow, endorse, consistent, and target audience (PERFECT).

This study has focused entirely upon international rugby union players; therefore no claim is made for generalisability to other contexts. A potential area for future research lies in replicating this study in different sport settings in order to identify whether the identified contextual factors also play a role outside of international rugby union and for different gender, playing-level or social media categories.

This study has reinforced that, within “real-life” social networking contexts, the development of an online profile can help create differentiation for players in a highly competitive market, especially if they share similar “sporting” characteristics with colleagues or other athletes. This research highlights that the utilisation of social networks by sports athletes has to become part of a strategic marketing approach.

The author draws attention to the theoretical position based on the PERFECT mnemonic offering sports athletes a framework to develop a successful online branding strategy. The central premise is based on emphasising uniqueness and distinction to offer a competitive advantage by delivering added value throughout various communications.

As a first step towards objective evaluation of garment appearance, the present work considered seams on three‐dimensional surfaces which simulate actual garment surfaces. The geometric profiles of the 3‐D seams were scanned using a laser scanner. 1‐D and 2‐D digital filters were applied to obtain pucker signals from the geometric profiles by removing “high frequency” components due to fabric surface texture and “low frequency” components due to garment silhouette and drape. The advantages and disadvantages of the 1‐D and 2‐D digital filters are compared. Four physical parameters are examined to see their relevance to the subjective pucker grade. It was found that log(σ²), i.e. the logarithm of the variance of the heights of pucker signals, is the best set of physical parameters for the objective evaluation of seam pucker. In addition, latest attempts at capturing and analyzing 3D garment image using a Cyberware laser scanner and Surfacer software are reported.