Consumer perceptions of service quality attributes at sporting events

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Abstract

Building on existing knowledge in the service marketing literature, this study investigates the importance of service attributes used by sports fans when evaluating the quality of their service experience at sporting events. A pool of 35 attributes was generated based on sports marketing and service quality literature, and pretest information provided from an MBA Services Marketing class and two undergraduate Sports Marketing classes. Cooperation was obtained from the athletic department of a university from a major athletic conference in the southeast. The sample was drawn from fans attending four basketball games during the month of February. The data were analyzed as follows. First, the mean importance value for each of the sports marketing service quality attributes was calculated. Next, the 35 attribute importance items were factor analyzed. Nine factors emerged from the data. The interpretation of these factors lead to the following labels (in order of variance explained): (1) employees, (2) price, (3) facility access, (4) concessions, (5) fan comfort, (6) game experience, (7) showtime, (8) convenience, and (9) smoking. After conducting the exploratory factor analysis, differences were examined in the mean importance values of these factors across a variety of demographic and fan identification characteristics.

Introduction

This study builds on existing knowledge in the service marketing literature by investigating the importance of service attributes sports fans might use when evaluating the quality of their service experience and their level of satisfaction at sporting events. Customer perceptions of service experiences are vital to the success of all service organizations. Service organizations providing sporting event experiences are no exception. It is generally understood that customer perceptions of service are closely related to perceptions of the brand, levels of loyalty to service organizations (e.g., Kelley and Davis, 1994), and the likelihood of repurchase (Oliva et al., 1992).

In the realm of the sports service encounter, fan attendance is a major source of revenue as teams have found they need more revenue from luxury seats, club seats, and stadium concessions to remain competitive and profitable (Gotthelf, 1998). A service encounter in a sports context can be very complex in that it often takes place over an extended period of time and can be influenced by a wide variety of factors. Principal factors that can effect the quality of the service encounter include the athletic contest itself, the atmosphere created by the facility, the other people attending the game, and the concessions sold at the event.

This study provides an exploratory empirical assessment of the importance of service attributes sports fans use when evaluating the quality of service and level of satisfaction they experience at sporting events. In the remainder of this manuscript, service quality and customer satisfaction literature is briefly reviewed and discussed in the context of sports marketing. This review is followed by the presentation of our research methods, analyses, and results. In concluding, the results of the study are discussed and implications for practitioners and researchers are presented.

Section snippets

Service quality

The construct of service quality has received a great deal of attention from services marketing researchers and has been systematically investigated over the past 10 to 15 years. The Gap Model provided the impetus for a great deal of this research (Parasuraman et al., 1985). This research, which was based on a series of executive interviews and consumer focus groups, identified 10 determinants of service quality. These determinants included: reliability, responsiveness, competence, access,

Sample

Cooperation was obtained from the athletic department of a university from a major athletic conference in the southeast. The study reported here was conducted in conjunction with a league-wide survey. The sample was drawn from fans attending four basketball games during the month of February — two men's games and two women's games. Students enrolled in an undergraduate Sports Marketing class served as interviewers for the data collection which was conducted at the entrances to the arena as fans

Mean importance values

Perhaps not surprisingly, initial examination of these mean values reveals that the quality of the game (5.94) and outcome of the game (5.44) were the most important attributes considered in the survey. Other important attributes included cleanliness of the arena (5.27), security in the parking area (5.13), seat location (5.05), parking location (5.04), and cleanliness of the restrooms (5.01). Of the 35 attributes considered in the item pool, only 11 of these attributes had mean importance

Discussion of the results

The results of this investigation provide some interesting findings that further our knowledge of service evaluations, particularly in the context of sporting events. The findings from this study suggest there are nine quality factors in the sporting event context, and that some of them are unique to this particular service encounter. These findings tend to support the arguments proposed by Carmen (1990) and Babukus and Boller (1992) that service quality dimensions tend to vary across different

Future research

The exploratory nature of this research provides a variety of possible directions for future researchers to pursue. In this investigation of how fans perceive the service experience at a sporting event, we considered the perceived importance of a variety of service attributes. Having identified the perceived importance of these attributes, subsequent researchers might consider measuring the expectations customers hold for these attributes and their perceptions of these attributes following a

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