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The questions raised in the case study could escort a classroom or online discussion for understanding licensed product consumption motives among the internal workforce.

Despite the Asiad (an abbreviation of Asian Games) being organized in the most populous continent, its financial profitability is minimal compared with the summer Olympic Games and other major sporting events. Thereby, Asiad board members are seeking to understand how they can target the right segment via licensed products. This will ultimately increase licensed product sales. On July 1, 2017, a board meeting was held in which the licensing product manager, Young Lee, proposed to target the internal workforce via licensed products based on 17th Asiad’s data and previous literature. Lee analyzed the attributes of licensed products sold at 17th Asiad and its psychological connection with the internal workforce. Hence, the purpose of this case study was to decipher the internal workforce feasibility as the right segment to target via licensed products for Asiad's management. The case study’s primary data was collected via IB worldwide (now Galaxia SM CO, Ltd), one of the leading sport marketing organizations in South Korea. The IB worldwide (now Galaxia SM CO, Ltd) signed an exclusive product license agreement with the Incheon Asian Games Organizing Committee jointly and individually with the Olympic Council of Asia to produce licensed products (e.g. Mascot dolls). This realistic case study should be understood through the lens of symbolic interactionism. Finally, this study is important to consider because the internal workforce licensed products consumption has gained little attention in sports marketing literature.

The case can be taught in marketing research and consumer behavior courses.

CSS 8: Marketing.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

The rampant toxic gaming environment in most major esports games has become a challenge in maintaining gamers’ loyalty to the game. Guided by the theory of stress and coping, this study aims to investigate how and under what condition esports gamers’ perceived risk of toxicity may affect game brand loyalty through the moderated mediation effects of game brand identification, self-efficacy, and perceived support from game brand.

The moderated mediation model was tested using the conditional process analysis (N = 311). The moderating effects of game brand identification on the mediated processes were tested in the model.

The authors found that self-efficacy and perceived support from game brand were critical mediators between the perceived risk of toxicity and game brand loyalty. However, these mediating effects varied depending on the level of game brand identification.

This study took the step forward by theorizing and empirically examining the relationship between perceived risk of toxicity and consumption outcome by considering both internal and social coping resources and game brand identification, among Generation Z and Millennial gamers in the esports context.

This study aims to examine how and when trainers' muscle mass impacts service purchase of personal fitness training, drawing upon signaling theory. Specifically, the authors investigated (1) the mediating role of perceived competence in the relationship between trainers' muscle mass (highly vs moderately muscular) and customers' service registration intention and (2) the moderating role of customer expertise in this mediating mechanism.

The authors conceptualized trainers' muscle mass, developed its experimental stimuli and validated them through the two pretests (total n = 387). Using the validated stimuli, the authors conducted the two experiments (total n = 802). In both experiments, the authors recruited participants via MTurk using the convenience sampling method and employed a single-factor between-subject design based on random assignment.

Findings supported the authors’ proporsed model. Consumers perceived highly (vs moderately) muscular trainers as more competent, which in turn engendered greater service registration intention. This effect emerged for expert consumers but not for novice consumers.

This study is one of the first attempts to empirically test the influence of trainers' muscle mass on consumer acquisition in the context of personal fitness training. It also expands the sport marketing literature to the consumer psychology and behavior fields addressing the characteristics of sport-service providers. The findings also provide fitness organizations with managerial insights into how to effectively leverage trainers' physical appearance as a marketing tool.

In highlighting brain wave responses of emotional processing, the purpose of this study is to investigate (1) the effect of sport participation involvement on affective reaction in viewing photos; and (2) the association between affective reaction and behavioral intentions.

Using lateralized event-related potentials, the authors examined how brain wave reactions are different based on different sport involvement between two groups where one group had varsity sport experience while the other expressed that they were not fans of the sport.

Results indicated a significant difference in lateralization between groups. Brain responses were greater in the high involvement group and positively correlated with the intention to attend future games.

The findings in this study elucidate the linkage between one's history of sport involvement and affective brain wave responses. Implications from neurophysiological evidence provide means to further dissect the multifaceted construct of involvement in the field of sport marketing.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the complexity of how spectators' multiple identities influence their behavioral intention. Specifically, the authors examined the effects of spectators' place identification, team identification and an interaction effect on attendance intention using social identity complexity framework.

Data were collected from spectators attending professional baseball games in South Korea. While 550 questionnaires were returned, 475 (86.36%) were used in the analysis after excluding incomplete responses. The research model was tested using latent moderated structural equations modeling.

Results indicated place identification only influenced attendance intentions through an interaction effect, while team identity directly affects attendance intention. Highly identified sport consumers intended to attend future games regardless of place identification, while the sense of love for the team's home region motivated low-identified sport consumers more to attend future games.

The findings of this research led to understanding the relationships between multiple identities and behavioral intention and provided the spectator sport industry with valuable strategies to manage their sport consumers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of perceived environmental quality of the stadium on fans’ future intentions to attend a game by highlighting the moderating effect of team loyalty.

Using latent moderated structural equations modeling, this study tested the direct impacts of stadium factors on consumers’ desire to stay and revisit intentions and the moderation effects of team loyalty based on Mehrabian and Russell’s environmental psychology behavioral model.

The results showed significant direct effects of team loyalty and desire to stay on revisit intentions. The stadium environment influenced desire to stay and revisit intentions only by the interactions with team loyalty. More specifically, higher loyalty led to higher desire to stay and revisit intentions, whereas fans’ positive experience of stadium environment intensified the effect.

The authors highlight the significant role of desire to stay on revisit intentions by incorporating the cognitive-affective system of human behavior. In addition, this study provides essential information for identifying the interaction effects of environmental factors and team loyalty on consumer behavior in sport settings.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how to generate innovative work behaviors among Millennial and Generation Z sport employees and its impact on their career satisfaction and psychological well-being.

The authors used structural equation modeling to examine the relationships among predictors of job engagement, innovative work behaviors, career satisfaction and psychological well-being. The model was tested across managerial sport employees of Division I athletics departments (N = 224).

The highlights of the study include job engagement's positive relationship with innovative work behaviors and the positive influence of innovative work behavior on career satisfaction and psychological well-being.

These findings signify the importance of considering job engagement and innovative work behaviors to develop a positive work experience for Millennial and Generation Z sport employees. Doing so is thought to be a critical step in cultivating an organizational competitive advantage via younger generations of sport employees.

Fitness service organizations often promote the personal training service by attributing competent features, qualifications, or/and service provision of fitness service providers to efforts or talents. This study aims to investigate whether and when the promotional attribution of fitness service providers' competent features, qualifications, or/and service provision contributes to customers' compliance with service instructions.

The authors developed the experimental stimuli of performance attribution promotion (i.e. effort attribution and talent attribution) and validated them via a pretest (N = 400). Utilizing the validated stimuli, the authors conducted an experiment (N = 400) employing a single-factor (performance attribution promotion: effort vs talent) between-subject design. The authors performed partial least squares structural modeling (PLS-SEM) to test our hypotheses.

The results revealed the interaction effect of performance attribution promotion and customers' implicit mindset on customer participation expectation. Specifically, when customers were high in implicit mindset (i.e. incremental-minded), attributing competent features, qualifications, or/and service provision of fitness service providers to effort (vs talent) increased customer participation expectation. Yet, when customers were low in implicit mindset (i.e. entity-minded), such an effect did not occur. Further, the authors identified customers' intention to comply with service instructions as a downstream consequence of the aforementioned interaction effect.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. It enriches the performance attribution literature by finding its new consequences and boundary condition. Moreover, the findings aid fitness service practitioners in developing strategies for eliciting customers' compliance with service instruction through performance attribution promotion.

The purpose of the study was (1) to examine the motivational composites determining consumers' continued intention to use digital ticketing via self-service technology (SST) by integrating service satisfaction and (2) to ascertain the differences between consumers according to their psychological discomfort toward technology.

Data were collected using a structured questionnaire, and a total of 323 were included in the analysis. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was utilized to test motivational determinants of digital ticketing. In addition, permutation-based multi-group analysis was performed to investigate the differences between consumers with high and low technology discomfort.

Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are positive predictors of continued intention to use digital ticketing, but only intrinsic motivation has a positive impact on continued intention through service satisfaction. Moreover, the relationship between intrinsic motivation, service satisfaction and continued intention was stronger for consumers with high psychological discomfort than those with low psychological discomfort.

Given the conspicuous characteristics of the digital ticketing process for sporting events, the insights gained from the study may be of assistance to researchers and practitioners in understanding sport consumers' ticket consumption behavior and the determinants of SST usage.

This study aims to identify an automated machine learning algorithm with high accuracy that sport practitioners can use to identify the specific factors for predicting Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance. Furthermore, by predicting spectators for each league (American League and National League) and division in MLB, the authors will identify the specific factors that increase accuracy, discuss them and provide implications for marketing strategies for academics and practitioners in sport.

This study used six years of daily MLB game data (2014–2019). All data were collected as predictors, such as game performance, weather and unemployment rate. Also, the attendance rate was obtained as an observation variable. The Random Forest, Lasso regression models and XGBoost were used to build the prediction model, and the analysis was conducted using Python 3.7.

The RMSE value was 0.14, and the R2 was 0.62 as a consequence of fine-tuning the tuning parameters of the XGBoost model, which had the best performance in forecasting the attendance rate. The most influential variables in the model are “Rank” of 0.247 and “Day of the week”, “Home team” and “Day/Night game” were shown as influential variables in order. The result was shown that the “Unemployment rate”, as a macroeconomic factor, has a value of 0.06 and weather factors were a total value of 0.147.

This research highlights unemployment rate as a determinant affecting MLB game attendance rates. Beyond contextual elements such as climate, the findings of this study underscore the significance of economic factors, particularly unemployment rates, necessitating further investigation into these factors to gain a more comprehensive understanding of game attendance.