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Sporting goods retailing is a significant sector within the sport industry with the total revenue of this sector reaching $52.2 billion in 2018. Beset with formidable competition, sporting goods stores are compelled to augment their merchandise with service and improve retail quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate retail quality of sporting goods stores (RQSGS).

Based on 27,793 online reviews of 1481 stores in the United States, this study used Leximancer 4.0, a text mining software, to identify critical retail quality dimensions associated with sporting goods stores, and further explored the most salient dimensions among different levels of ratings.

Customer service and store aspects are the two higher-order dimensions of RQSGS; holistic experience, manager and staff are three themes under customer service, and product, B&M store and online–offline integration are three themes under store aspects. Furthermore, extreme reviews focus more on customer service, whereas lukewarm reviews focus more on store aspects.

Knowledgeable staff, managers and online–offline integration are instrumental in creating superior retail quality. Sporting goods stores should enhance hedonic and social values for consumers in order to ward off online competitions.

This study explored retail quality dimensions that are pertinent to sporting goods retailing utilizing text mining methods. This study to certain extent cross-validated the existing retailing literature that is developed on alternative methods.

In the era of the retail Apocalypse, the surge of e-commerce has transmuted the competitive landscape for many traditional retailers that heavily rely on brick-and-mortar stores. This study examines the relationship among retail quality, market environment and businesses' survival in the context of the sporting goods retail industry.

Based on a data set from yelp.com, the authors examine the survival of 1,360 stores within 306 zip codes in the United States using mixed effects logistic modeling.

(1) Retail quality is positively related to survival, but the relationship is nonlinear; (2) the author find a null relationship between market competition and survival, which is subject to several competing interpretations; (3) 10% of the individual variation in survival is due to systematic differences between zip codes and (4) chain stores and stores with more heterogenous reviews have a higher closure rate.

This study contributes to the literature by offering an empirical testing of the relationship between retail quality and business survival and examining the impact of trading area in the modern marketing milieu. The findings have practical implications for site selection and designing a service quality program.

This study focuses on memorable customer shopping experience design in the sporting goods retail setting. It aims to identify the phygital customers' needs and expectations that are satisfied through in-store technologies and to detect the in-store strategies that use these technologies to make the store attractive and experiential.

This exploratory study adopted a qualitative research methodology, specifically a multiple-case study, by performing semi-structured interviews with sporting goods store managers.

Sporting goods retailers use various in-store technologies to create a phygital customer shopping experience, including devices, mobile apps, wireless communication technologies, in-store activations, support devices, intelligent stations, and sensors. To improve the phygital customer journey and the phygital shopping experience, retailers meet customers' needs for utilitarian, hedonic, social, and playfulness experiences. Purely physical or digital strategies, as well as phygital strategies, are identified. This research also proposes a model of in-store phygital customer shopping experience design for sporting goods retailers.

Sporting goods managers can invest in multiple technologies by designing a physical environment according to the customers' needs for utilitarian, hedonic, social, and playful experiences. In addition, they can improve the phygital customer shopping experience with specific push strategies that increase customer engagement and, in turn, brand and store loyalty.

This study highlights how the phygital customer experiential journey can be created through new technologies and improved with specific reference to the sporting goods stores.

Retail has evolved over the past century alongside megatrends such as urbanization, consumerism and digitalization. To contribute to existing knowledge on patterns of retail form evolution, the purpose of this paper is to investigate when and how novel retail forms have evolved in the Swedish sporting goods market.

An evolutionary approach that encompasses population thinking is used to interpret the history of sporting goods retailing in Sweden from the interwar era onwards. Drawing on archival data and interviews, the focus in the historical analysis is on the evolution of retail form variation in terms of size, strategy, product range and retail channel (online/offline).

The paper suggests that evolutionary mechanisms cumulatively have changed the sports retail population from a rather homogenous set of smaller generalist stores toward a larger variety and specialization in mainly two directions: one trajectory toward small and service-focused niche specialists and the other toward high-volume sales outlets.

The paper provides a detailed empirical account of sports retail history in Sweden and an application of theoretical concepts contributing to an integrated investigation of empirical issues and theoretical positions. It concludes that being able to attain “closures” – finding ways to close off a section of the market and avoid direct competition – has historically been a crucial capability for individual retailers to thrive.

From a knowledge-management perspective, this paper aims to analyze the digital transformation of the business models of traditional Chinese sporting goods companies in the context of the pandemic crisis and to explore the role of their digital transformation in coping with the crisis.

Using theoretical sampling, typical sporting goods companies are selected for case studies. We provide an in-depth analysis of how these companies achieve high performance levels through the digital transformation of their business models in the post-COVID-19 era and discuss the key role of knowledge management in this achievement.

Focusing on the challenges faced by Chinese sporting goods enterprises during the pandemic crisis from the knowledge-management perspective, we find that through the digital transformation of their business models, enterprises can improve their knowledge-management capabilities, enhance their flexibility to respond to sudden crises and maintain a higher level of corporate performance.

This paper has significant implications for sporting goods companies wishing to achieve high corporate performance through the digital transformation of their business models in the post-COVID-19 era. Future research should address the dynamic mechanism of the digital transformation of business models to improve enterprise knowledge-management capabilities and the impact mechanism of knowledge-management capabilities on interenterprise organizational resilience.

This paper proposes specific strategies in the process of the digital transformation of business models that are essential for improving enterprises’ internal and external knowledge-management capabilities.

The purpose of this paper is to determine whether consumers’ attitude toward sporting goods retailers depends on who engages in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and where CSR takes place. The study aims to replicate previous findings on football teams (Kulczycki and Koenigstorfer, 2016) for for-profit sporting goods retailers by looking at how organization size and proximity of the supported cause to the retailers’ headquarters interact with consumers’ motive attributions for CSR (philanthropic vs profit).

In total, 200 participants took part in the experimental study. The study applied a between-participant design manipulating both the proximity of the supported social cause (local vs distant CSR) and the size of the organization (small- vs large-sized organization) and measured perceived motives for CSR as independent variables. Attitude toward retailers was the dependent variable.

The results of regression analyses showed that perceived philanthropic motives increased attitude toward retailers. This relationship became stronger for large-sized sporting goods retailers, in particular when they engaged in CSR activities at distant locations. For small-sized retailers, the proximity of CSR did not impact on the relationship between motive attribution and attitude toward the retailer.

Large-sized retailers are encouraged to take particular care that consumers perceive CSR activities as philanthropy-driven, especially when supporting social causes at distant locations.

The study replicates previous findings and shows that not only for sports teams, but also for sporting good retailers, CSR can increase consumer attitudes even when the consumer population at the organization headquarters’ location does not directly benefit from CSR.

Manufacturers of labour‐intensive, branded consumer goods – particularly apparel and footwear – are facing increasing pressure from consumer groups, non‐government organisations (NGOs), and other stakeholders, to provide assurances that contracted suppliers in developing countries are complying with global labour and environmental standards. Companies have adopted a variety of strategies to strengthen and monitor compliance by their suppliers, including codes of conduct, direct monitoring by their own personnel, more stringent contract conditions, and reduction in the number of contractors. Increasingly, companies are turning to what are termed here “monitoring coalitions”, membership organisations that undertake to organise the monitoring of labour or other standards in overseas factories. To be effective, these emerging systems must address a range of issues, including how to manage the monitoring process, what standard to set, how to finance monitoring, how to disseminate the information collected, and, most difficult, how to accomplish costeffective monitoring in tens of thousands of production facilities in Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa.

The case aims to deal with multigenerational entrepreneurship. The family business of sports goods was initiated by Yashpal Aggarwal and his friends in the 1950s. Yashpal acquired the art of doing business and started initially with trading of sporting goods in Mumbai. Yashpal had three sons, Ashok, Ashwini and Rajesh, who ventured into sports trading business as well. After the demise of Yashpal, Ashok shifted to Jalandhar and started a manufacturing unit, producing roller skates. Ashwini, being entrepreneurial and innovative, had always desired to professionalise the business and hence started with Okini Sports. Okini Sports emerged as the first organised professional sports mall in India.

Based on case research, individual interviews at different levels, testing the case several times and filling the case gaps during the process to authenticate information, multiple sources of information have been used.

Businesses largely compete on the basis of available talent, competency and capability. Family businesses must be open to induct competent people within the family with the required skills to lead the company. If a family nurtures a member with requisite skills, values, to keep shareholders, key customers, and suppliers loyal to the business, then family leadership is the best option. As the business grows in dimension, differential capabilities are required to run the business competitively, hence, inducting talented individuals as professionals is a better option. A family must be realistic about the talents available internally.

This case is restricted to sports family business entrepreneurship in the context of India, but has a great learning towards multigenerational entrepreneurship.

The case is original with the family in its fourth generation, the youngest looking to diversify and professionalize the business, set his family dreams of setting up the biggest sports mall in India.