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In the highly competitive professional sports industry, managers of a newly established competition face many challenges, including “converting” or gaining the allegiance of new groups of consumers (fans, spectators) to their colors. One critical aspect in the converting process relates to the “ideal” game-day experience as perceived by would-be consumers. Gaining knowledge about this area could be critical to professional sport marketers in enhancing the perceived quality of sport events. This study examines the ideal football experience among 1,412 fans of an Australian A-League football (soccer) club. The importance of a lively atmosphere, that of high turnouts of spectators and the opportunity to watch quality and attacking football are highlighted in most comments, even relegating the game’s final score (winning) to a more marginal level of importance. Some of the implications of the findings for professional football marketers and avenues for future research are presented and discussed.

The consumer behaviour literature is evolving towards the assumption that products are inherently experiential bundles, and after all, all businesses are operating within the experienced economy. Experiences are much more advantageous for the consumers because they advance happiness or enjoyment of life (instead of survival or maintenance). Experiential purchases lead to greater happiness levels compared to material purchases. Reliance on materialism and material purchases is shown to be the reason of low happiness levels in even the most affluent countries.

In this chapter, based on theoretical as well as empirical papers, I analyse experiences and the consumption of experiences in the Turkish context. The arguments are supported by up-to-date market analysis of related industries conducted by independent market research agencies. The first section looks at the rise of experientialism in retail industries, such as in the case of shopping malls. The following sections touch upon main experiential categories such as tourism, dining and sports. Finally, the social aspects of experiences are discussed in the context of third-place experiences, and some empirical findings are presented. The chapter concludes with some recommendations for practitioners, experience designers, service providers as well as researchers.

Factors that influence the game attendance and attitudinal loyalty of sports fans have been researched quite extensively in Anglo-American countries, but rather less in Germany. Brand image is held to be an important antecedent of fan loyalty. This study therefore investigates the relationship between these constructs, using a sample of 1,300 fans of German Bundesliga soccer teams. In addition to the verification of this link, causal modelling reveals a relationship between the major facets of a club's brand image, namely attributes and benefits. Non-product-related attributes of the brand are more important to the fans' loyalty than product-related attributes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the interrelationship between television (TV) consumption (viewing ratings), engagement behaviors of different actors on Twitter (TV programs, media, celebrities and viewers) and the content of engagement behaviors (affective, program-related and social content).

TV ratings and Twitter data were obtained. The content of tweets was analyzed by means of a sentiment analysis. A vector auto regression model was used to understand the interrelationship between tweets of different actors and TV consumption.

First, the results showed a negative interrelationship between TV viewing and viewers’ tweeting behavior. Second, tweets by celebrities and media exhibited similar patterns and were both affected mostly by the number of tweets by viewers. Finally, the content of tweets matters. Affective tweets positively relate to TV viewing, and program-related and social content positively relates to the number of tweets by viewers.

The findings help us understand the online engagement ecosystem and provide insights into drivers of TV consumption and online engagement of different actors.

The results indicate that content producers may want to focus on stimulating affective conversations on Twitter to trigger more online and offline engagement. The results also call for rethinking the meaning of TV metrics.

While some studies have explored viewer interactions on Twitter, only a few studies have looked at the effects of such interactions on variables outside of social media, such as TV consumption. Moreover, the authors study the interrelations between Twitter interactions with TV consumption, which allows us to examine the effect of online engagement on offline behaviors and vice versa. Finally, the authors take different actors into account when studying real-life online engagement.

Insights into how fan experience can be used to cultivate football (soccer) fan loyalty are limited. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) paradigm, this study develops and tests a theoretical model investigating the effects of football-game socialisation, team interest, football interest and transaction satisfaction (stimuli) on fanship and cumulative satisfaction (organism), and subsequently, attitudinal loyalty and behavioural loyalty (response). National culture was a moderator.

A self-administered online survey collected data from a convenience sample of 762 football fans from Brazil, China and Germany.

The PLS-SEM results support the S-O-R based model, indicating that football fan-loyalty behaviours are determined by fanship and cumulative satisfaction with the team. Fan experiences, in turn, are also found to be influenced by fan perceptions relating to socialisation, team interest, football interest and transaction satisfaction—elements over which the football team's management may exert some degree of control. Some national cultural differences were found, with three of the model's 12 structural paths significantly different for Germany vis-à-vis Brazil.

This study advances the authors’ understanding of the significance of socialisation and fan-interest factors for football, providing evidence supporting the role of the fan experience and service-consumption stimuli related to those game experiences as significant drivers (stimuli) of the fan's affective (fanship) and cognitive states (cumulative satisfaction). This study enriches the limited body of evidence on fanship's role as a driver of attitudinal and behavioural loyalty. Finally, the multi-country study partially supports the moderation effect of national culture.

The aim of this paper is to explore how the paradox of individualism/tribalism is brought into play and negotiated by consumers in the wake of the post-postmodern era.

The paper draws on netnographic and interview data from the Greek football manager (FM) online gaming community. FM is a simulation strategy game in which players act as “real-life” managers from the screen of their computer.

A central paradox and a set of four supporting paradoxes are identified. These paradoxes give rise to a transitional mode of experience, which lies on the borders of reality and fantasy, and is realised both at the individual and the tribal levels.

This study makes a threefold contribution. First, it advances the understanding of the paradoxical aspects of consumption experiences in light of post-postmodern consumer culture. Second, it shows how these paradoxes are negotiated by consumers between individual and tribal levels. Third, it extends the understanding of the nature of consumption experiences through the development of the concept of the transitional consumption experience.

Purpose – We investigated recent efforts of the Australian Football League (AFL) to reintroduce the sport of Australian Football to post-Apartheid South Africa. The chapter adopts a critical approach exploring the difference between the rhetoric of reconciliation and its use as a commercial marketing tool and other agendas that may be at play in international expansion.

Design/methodology/approach – The discussion and research findings outlined in this chapter are based on extensive tape-recorded interviews with Anglo-Australian advocates, African converts and Indigenous Australian critics of the claim to reconciliation as well as field notes collected during the time of visits to Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa and Alice Springs, Australia.

Findings – Key themes to emerge from the interviews are presented, cohering around issues of identity, as well as personal and community empowerment through sport, together with the claimed uniqueness of Australian Football to achieve reconciliation in Australia and international contexts such as South Africa.

Research limitations/implications – The limitations of using an ethnographic approach are indicated. This research draws on the qualitative and self-reflective approaches that are characteristic of contemporary indigenous studies where the emphasis is on attempts to allow indigenous people and other marginal voices to speak for themselves.

Originality/value – The chapter provides the first scholarly engagement with the expansion of Australian Football in the new South Africa in the context of the politics of indigenous reconciliation.

The objective of this paper is to respond to four research questions. The first two as how likely are college football season ticket holders to recommend (1) purchasing a similar season ticket package and (2) attending a home football game, to a friend or colleague. The third question examines if there is a difference between advocacy toward purchasing season tickets as compared to advocacy toward game attendance. Finally, we identify what factors impact advocacy for college football season ticket holders.

An online survey of 57,240 season ticket holders from 69 different National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision programs was undertaken. The data were analyzed to build a model of the drivers of advocacy in season ticket holders from a conceptual base of advocacy, trust and loyalty.

The identified drivers include both institutionally influenced factors and factors related to season ticket holder behaviors/demographics. The season ticket holder is arguably the highest level of fan for any sports organization from an affinity perspective and clearly the most important from a business perspective. This research argues that the season ticket holder should not only be the focus of ticket sales efforts but also leveraged as marketing advocates with the objective of attracting additional fans.

The value of this research is the large sample of data from season ticket holders of NCAA Division 1 football clubs and the resulting learning it provides to researchers and practitioners.