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The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework of third-place value offering that explains how specific consumer groups’, senior citizens, customer-to-customer engagement in third places can develop their value experiences.

Data were collected for two studies from senior citizen clubs in Australia. Study 1 uses focus group (12) and is analysed with QSR NVivo software following content analysis. Study 2 is based on 324 surveys and is analysed with AMOS version 24 software.

Study 1 identifies eight themes based on 29 main codes to develop a framework on the value offerings of third-place value and its consumer-centric effect on seniors’ loyalty and social capital. The themes under social capital and loyalty contributed to a better understanding of how consumers engage with each other in social clubs and develop their social capital. The results of Study 2 support the conceptualisation of third-place value offering as a reflective model and confirm the model’s nomological validity in relation to seniors’ loyalty and social capital outcomes.

The only limitation of the paper is that it presents findings based on data collected in a regional place in Australia.

The findings provide three practical implications for managers to consider in relation to service places: improve consumer patronage through community engagement, improve local business practices via consumer–owner friendship and redesign spatial settings to deliver meaningful consumer experiences.

The present study has three social implications; first, it highlights the significant role of third places in bringing isolated groups of community together for regular interaction and socialisation. It also extends understanding on senior citizen customers and their consumption experiences within third places for value creation. The study also contributes to understanding how senior citizen customers develop loyalty towards third places and enhance their social capital through social engagement in the place.

This paper uses consumption experience to develop the consumer value in third places. It provides a consumer-centric focus to servicescape and incorporates recent works on third places, value, social capital and loyalty.

Explores the experience of the e´lite, private social clubs of London and suggests that they are a flourishing sector of the hospitality industry. The paper suggests that the traditional gentlemen’s club is being joined by a new type of e´lite private social club with more modern conceptions of the “clubbable”. The paper analyses the differences and similarities between the two types of clubs in the areas of gender, value for money, concepts of “e´lite” and the function of a club. The paper contends that private clubs are an increasingly‐significant sector of the hospitality industry, because of the way they fulfil the needs of the late twentieth‐century consumer. They provide high status “niches” for a fragmented social “e´lite” and they fill the space between automated work and leisure.

This paper aims to report on a qualitative study that explores senior citizen consumers ' empowerment through social engagement in third places and their subsequent loyalty to third places.

Data were collected via a qualitative research design from four seniors ' clubs in Australia using focus groups (12), and participant observation. The data were analyzed using QSR NVivo software using an interpretive approach.

Ten themes based on 34 codes were identified in the study, which were grouped to develop a conceptual model of the antecedents and consequences of seniors ' empowerment in third places for further testing. The themes under consumer empowerment were important in assisting to understand the significance of place and social engagement within the place to empower seniors with a positive self-image, better access to information and exercise of choices for smarter purchase decisions. The themes under social capital contributed to a better understanding of the ramification of social capital to marketing knowledge. This was particularly so for marketing constructs embedded in community or aggregate level issues such as value co-creation, relationship marketing, customer involvement and related outcomes. Finally the study reports three types of loyalty: cognitive, ultimate and communal loyalty, that underpinned the behavioral, attitudinal and cognitive dimension of loyalty. The findings suggested that consequent to seniors ' social capital and feeling of empowerment in third places they display loyalty to the third place.

The present study has three theoretical implications; first, it extends knowledge into the notion of third place which underlies the broader domain of servicescape. It also extends understanding of the significance of third places in practicing consumer centric marketing through consumer empowerment. The study also contributes to understanding how third places enhance seniors ' social capital through social engagement.

The managerial implications suggested by the findings provide a number of aspects that managers may consider in relation to service places in three key broad categories of customer-firm interest: improve customer patronage through community engagement, improve local business practices via customer-owner friendship, and redesigning spatial settings to deliver meaningful customer experiences.

This paper uses the concepts of social engagement within customer community in third places for the development of social capital and empowerment. It provides a customer centric focus to servicescape and incorporates recent works on third places, empowerment, social capital and loyalty.

Advertisers frequently use social media for interactive and customer-oriented relationship marketing (RM) purposes. Moreover, sports clubs and players have been using their social media accounts to post content of their sponsors and other advertising companies. Such posts create visibility and have value for these advertising companies, something which has not been empirically quantified in the existing literature. Hence, this paper's purpose is to identify the factors or attributes that influence the value of such advertisement posts.

A discrete choice approach is used to empirically estimate the utility that sponsorship managers derive from a post advertising their company or product on football clubs' and players' social media.

The results indicate that more followers, better on-field performance and a lower price significantly increase the advertising company's utility. Moreover, the used social media channel has a significant influence too, since Facebook and Instagram are preferred over Twitter, due to the latter's limited degrees of freedom for advertisers.

Considering additional factors such as the image fit between sponsor and sponsee and presence on the Chinese social media market offers an interesting avenue for future research.

The empirical estimates allow commercial managers of clubs and players to derive companies' relative willingness to pay (WTP) for changes in characteristics of advertisements on their social media from the calculated utilities. This information can be used in the pricing decision when social media posts are sold or included in sponsorship packages.

This is the first study applying discrete choice modelling to link social media marketing (SMM) and sports marketing.

A perceived misalignment between socially responsible fans and football club management has recently led to a major crisis during the annual meeting in 2021 of Bayern Munich, one of the largest professional football teams in Europe. In an unprecedented scenario, Bayern Munich fans demanded that management drop one of its largest sponsors due to alleged violation of human rights. The goal of this paper is to examine this particular phenomenon, as it not only demonstrates a discrepancy between the social organizational identity and its image, but more importantly, how it impacts legitimation strategies and the fans' loyalty attitudes towards the club.

Using the underlying concepts of legitimacy and loyalty, this conceptual model paper proposes two frameworks for social responsibility in professional football clubs: (1) analyzing how the (mis-)alignment between organizational identity and image impacts fan loyalty and (2) depicting four different types of social responsibility strategies to align organizational identity and image.

The authors identify various theoretical concepts that influence organizational identity and image in and for social responsibility and combine the two critical concepts of legitimacy and loyalty to categorize the social responsibility strategies for professional football clubs.

Both frameworks advance the understanding of the decision-making behind social responsibility strategies and also synthesize the current literature to offer conceptual clarity regarding the varied implications and outcomes linked to the misalignment between organizational identity and image.

Private club members belong to an organization where people with common interests, experiences, backgrounds and professions meet for social and recreational purposes. This study aims to examine the relationships among private club members’ perceptions of social media regarding perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, attitude toward social media involvement and behavioral intention toward social media usage.

An online survey was conducted among private club members across the USA (n = 571). The data were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

The findings of this study center on the perceptions of club members and their beliefs and attitudes associated with their social media usage behavior. This study extends the social media literature by supporting previous studies that suggest a causal flow from perceived ease of use to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment) based on a motivational model.

This study is meaningful for revealing the perceptions of private club members and their beliefs and attitudes associated with their social media usage behavior. It is untested whether this study’s model applies to other hospitality businesses. Future research could examine other segments and add other variables such as perceived security and trust.

This study can provide private club managers, and the members of the clubs that they lead, with a better understanding of online social media.

This study is one of a few empirical online social media studies in the area of the private club industry. This study seeks to provide baselines regarding social media perceptions and usage in the hospitality literature by providing a comprehensive model.

Professional basketball clubs generate value not only for shareholders, but also for other stakeholders. These organizations create a broader social value for a wide range of stakeholders, and thus, it is useful to consider these stakeholders' perceptions of social value creation. Therefore, under the generic framework of grounded theory, this paper aims to create a stakeholder map of professional basketball clubs, taking into account the common coopetition context in sporting competitions.

In total, 49 qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted in collaboration with the representatives of two Spanish basketball clubs to establish the particularities of the stakeholders of these organizations compared with non-sport businesses (NsP) to confirm the stakeholder map. The Bryson process was used to develop the stakeholder map.

The map shows that there are three kinds of stakeholders of professional basketball clubs compared with non-sport organizations: similar, singular and entirely different. The perception of different social value dimensions confirm the findings of the stakeholder map, emphasizing that these organizations should take into account multidimensional stakeholder-value creation (functional, social, emotional and epistemic).

This study provides evidence from a holistic point of view that economic performance is not a unique indicator for measuring basketball clubs as efficient organizations, proving the usefulness of the stakeholder map.

European elite professional basketball clubs do not pursue economic profit maximization per se, but they also seek to create social value for stakeholders due to the community outreach and the emotional bonding that such organizations create. Here the purpose of this paper is to use an accounting system called social accounting to measure the social effects of an organization's activity in an effort to monetize and describe the holistic value created by these sports organizations for their stakeholders.

This study applies an adapted, redesigned social accounting using SPOLY methodology to two elite basketball clubs in the ACB League (Spanish First Division), in order to monetize their social value. This methodology integrates non-market social value (value created for stakeholders without a financial transaction) with market social value (value created for stakeholders through market transactions), by monetizing validated dimensions for non-market and market social value obtained via information provided by clubs and their financial statements.

Clubs create a quantifiable social value for stakeholders through non-market and market dimensions. Value creation is not merely restricted to securing financial profit for shareholders but rather takes on another dimension in which the various stakeholders receive a holistic value from clubs.

This study provides evidence that clubs generate a quantifiable social value for their stakeholders that complements their economic value. This can help clubs to set up their own narrative concerning value creation for stakeholders and enable them to convey and manage the overall distributed value for stakeholders.

If social capital is understood as the ability to access resources through social ties, it is clearly important to understand how people form social ties and what types of ties they form. Research has sought to do this, but it has seldom directly examined how organisations shape these processes and outcomes. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In-depth, comparative case study research was conducted at two voluntary sport organisations in the UK, involving 23 in-depth interviews and participant observation over a 15-month period.

The case studies showed how key organisational practices structured, in meaningful ways, people’s opportunities for interaction and the nature of that interaction, shaping the ways in which they formed ties and exchanged resources. The organisations fostered the formation of both strong and weak ties, but also “compartmentally intimate” ties.

The research challenges individualistic, rational choice accounts of tie formation, highlighting the role of organisations as brokers. In addition, interviewees’ accounts challenge well-accepted distinctions between strong and weak ties, by demonstrating the importance of ongoing, context-specific interaction.

This research offers a rare, direct insight into the role of organisations in shaping people’s ongoing social relationships. In doing so, it problematises existing conceptualisations of social capital and social ties and highlights an alternative, organisationally embedded, process-based perspective on social capital.

Professional football clubs currently strive for a number of concurrent goals, ranging from on-field success to profit maximization to fan expansion and engagement. The purpose of this paper, theoretically informed by the social penetration theory, is to analyze the economics behind such goals and examine the association between team performance, commercial success, and social media followers in professional team sports.

A data set relating to 20 European professional football clubs that combines financial (revenues and costs), sporting, and digital-reach measures for three consecutive football seasons (2013/2014 to 2015/2016) was used. In addition, to elaborate on this data in terms of a descriptive study, the study constructs a range of correlation statistical tests and linear modeling techniques to obtain quantitative results.

The results indicate that all the three main sources of club revenues (match-day, commercial/sponsorship, and broadcasting) are positive drivers for Facebook followers. Staff investments (staff costs) are also positively related to Facebook followers, albeit to a lesser extent, while higher-ranked clubs seem to follow a constant approach in terms of their revenues and cost structure.

This study seeks to bridge the communication and sport economic research, providing evidence that Facebook followers are part of the cyclical phenomenon of team revenues and team performance. In doing so, it initiates a debate on the relationship between the digital expansion of a football club and its sports and financial indicators.