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It has become common for academics and sports marketing professionals to study and explain the heterogeneity and complexity of sports spectators' behaviours and attitudes, with numerous works addressing this topic But these surveys are more about fans of professional sports clubs (soccer, basketball, baseball, hockey, etc) who attend regular season games in their favourite teams' home stadium or arena. To our knowledge, very few studies have been conducted into spectators of national teams. It is these spectators who are of the focus of this paper.

The purpose of this paper was to explore a new sport attendance behavior spectrum framework where sport consumer behavior is not derived from just a dichotomy of a motivator positively impacting attendance or a constraint negatively impacting attendance. Rather, when accounting for the context of the setting (e.g. sport, playing level, locality, patron type, etc.), some areas belong on a spectrum that fluctuates between positive and negative impacts on attendance that are dependent on the context of the given environment.

Through factor analysis and structural equation modeling, the proposed model attempted to explain relationships between five second-order factors and game attendance, which expanded to include the new internal contextual and external contextual factors, and ultimately team fandom.

The results indicated three significant main effects where internal contextual exhibited a positive relationship with attendance, while constraints and external contextual demonstrated a negative relationship. Internal and external motives were not significant. Further, the moderating effect of high and low sport interest groupings largely indicated no significant spectator differences. The model explained 24% of the variance in attendance, and attendance accounted for 41% of the variance in team fandom.

Attendance is intricate, and this study highlighted the importance of considering and adapting to the sporting context as some factors exist on a sport attendance behavior spectrum and differently impact spectators positively or negatively, given the context of the setting. Further, in this lower-level sport setting, consumers viewed minor league hockey more as a leisure commodity than a premier sport contest.

This paper aims to focus on similarity cues that may strengthen bonds among crowd members and that serve as “glue” between individual group members in the context of collective football-viewing events.

Study 1 is a qualitative field study that focused on the subjective socio-emotional experiences of event visitors, whereas Study 2 tested the hypotheses quantitatively.

The qualitative pre-study revealed a variety of discrete emotions that consumers experienced through the course of consumption. Apart from individualistic emotions, respondents reported feeling common bonds with fellow crowd members. Respondents used a variety of emotion terms to express this experience. Moreover, we found different types of similarity cues which strengthen feelings of connectedness among crowd members in a football-watching scenario. Collaborative actions and team identification, as a sports-specific variable, foster a feeling of social connectedness, which in turn directly positively affects consumer enjoyment.

Experiencing a feeling of social connectedness may serve as a starting point for a long-term relationship with the service itself or with associated brands. Future experimental studies might isolate the antecedents of a feeling of social connectedness and, thus, enhance the understanding of consumers’ emotional states during the course of hedonic consumption.

Service providers should encourage consumers to perform collaborative actions, as consumers potentially infect others and start a ripple effect.

This paper differs from existing work on crowds, in that the authors focus on similarity cues as antecedents of feelings of connectedness among group members.

The purpose of this study is to examine how sports marketing can attract audiences towards less popular sports.

A total of 22 interviews were conducted first to explore the opinions of sports professionals about how audiences can be attracted towards less popular sports. Then 479 responses to an online questionnaire were collected. The online questionnaire includes a pretest-posttest experiment in which each respondent has watched a video. Confirmatory factor analysis, reliability test and hierarchical regression analysis have been performed.

The elements of sports marketing that can help to attract audiences towards less popular sports are sports media, sports advertising, star athlete and sports sponsorship. The performance of national teams moderates the relationship between sports advertising and attraction towards less popular sports.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, a definition of sustainable sports marketing is introduced for the first time. Sustainable sports marketing can be defined as the continuous implementation of marketing activities in the sports context to ensure the continuous existence of the sports themselves (all types of sports) and the prosperity of future generations. Elements that can attract audiences towards less popular sports have been examined for the first time.

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.

There are few studies examining the marketing characteristics of intercollegiate women's volleyball spectators. The purpose of this paper is to examine intercollegiate women's volleyball spectators from the perspectives of sociodemographics, market demand and consumption. Spectators (N=265) from seven intercollegiate women's volleyball games at three National Collegiate Athlete Association Division-I universities participated in the study. The findings indicate that there is a need to emphasise the market demand factors when marketing intercollegiate women's volleyball games.

This paper examines the impact of the national sports lottery (toto) in 2001 and the 2002 FIFA World Cup for the Japan Professional Soccer League - J. League. In 2001 J. League attendances grew dramatically and were sustained in subsequent years, even though member clubs did not change many of their marketing strategies and chose to maintain a distance from toto. The evidence suggests that hosting the World Cup allowed the league to leverage the country's hosting of the event in order to generate long-term interest and attendance at J. League games. By contrast, toto appears to have had a short-term impact.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate female National Football League (NFL) spectators’ preferences and feedback in regard to various customer service components of the NFL game day experience. The primary components with respect to female spectators’ choices, preferences, and feedback are as follows: apparel and other merchandise; food and beverage; restrooms and facility cleanliness; tailgating and parking; participants’ decision to attend an NFL game; and participants’ perceptions of the NFL. A core objective was to learn more about the female decision-making process and overall experience at NFL games.

All data were collected during the 2012-2013 NFL regular season. Four different data collections were conducted at two NFL stadiums to investigate the game day experiences of women at NFL games. Previous research was used as a basis for creating survey questions about the female game day experience. In this study, an open-ended questionnaire contained both quantitative and qualitative questions, both forms of data were collected and analyzed, and researchers made both quantitative and qualitative interpretations based on the data.

Findings and results indicated women are diverse customers. Sport organizations need to focus on the minor details that reflect how individuals experience a brand and product, as these sport organizations have the opportunity to enhance the female customer experience and retain existing female customers if the organizations systemically listen to and communicate with the female customer at NFL games. The NFL and individual NFL teams should include female spectators in the brand strategy process. Female customers of the NFL can be powerful brand loyalists and outstanding brand ambassadors.

This research study provides an investigation of the preferences and perceptions of women spectators at NFL games. One contribution of the current study is that researchers have accepted the challenge by some researchers calling for more complexity with researching gender and attempting to shift some of the ways in which women are viewed as fans and spectators. However, what is key with the approach in the current study is that researchers allowed the women to be heard with respect to their game day experiences, perceptions, and thoughts about their identity as a spectator.

The results from this study extend previous research by empirically testing the involvement based Psychological Continuum Model (PCM) segmentation procedure on sports spectators. To date, the procedure has only been verified using sports participants, although the PCM was developed with a broader range of sports consumers in mind. The validity of the procedure is confirmed using two online surveys, which gather data from spectators at both the league (n=761) and team (n=623) level. A three-step segmentation procedure then places respondents into the PCM stages - awareness, attraction, attachment and allegiance. ANOVA tests indicate that the four groups significantly differ from one another on attitudinal and behavioural measures for both league and team spectators. Findings suggest that the PCM is an appropriate framework to investigate fan development at both league and team levels. Thus sports marketers are provided with a research segmentation tool capable of helping them to better understand their heterogeneous consumer bases and thus guide marketing decisions.

This study compared the motives and media consumption behaviours of American and South Korean spectators of Mixed Martial Arts. Significant cross-national differences were noted in sport interest, vicarious achievement, aesthetics, national pride and violence. Backward regression analyses indicated that sport interest, fighter interest and drama predicted media consumption at the American event, while sport interest, drama and adoration were significant predictors at the Korean event.