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Professional sport organizations are showing increasing interest in proenvironmental strategies, as evidenced in part by the recent incorporation of sustainable design in many facilities. This interest may be driven by the perceived positive outcomes associated with the triple bottom line (TBL), which illustrates the environmental, social, and economic benefits of proenvironmental initiatives. The TBL has been the subject of both acclaim and criticism by scholars and practitioners, and this study provides new insight into its appropriateness as a reflection of proenvironmental organizations’ motives. Through standardized interviews, the authors found that professional sport organizations place particular emphasis on the TBL’s social component, which represents the objectives of increasing environmental awareness among fans and attracting new consumers. This study contends that the TBL’s three components are closely intertwined, and the implementation of commercial and social marketing strategies is necessary to attend to and realize the organizations’ stated goal of maximizing all three components.

This study focused on developing a model to explain relationships among constraints, motivators, and attendance, and empirically test the proposed model within the spectator sport context. The proposed model explained 34% of variance in Attendance. Results showed that Attachment to the Team, an internal motivator, entered first and explained approximately 21% of the variance in attendance. Lack of Success, an internal constraint, entered next and explained almost 10% additional variance. Leisure Alternatives, an external constraint entered next and explained an additional 3%. The ability to properly evaluate constraints and motivators gives sport marketers the opportunity to more effectively serve existing fans, as well as attract new fans.

Sport consumers are increasingly discontented and disconnected with sport organizations and researchers have advocated a fundamental shift in sport marketing from a traditional exchange paradigm to a relationship paradigm. Relationship quality is critical to understanding sport consumer-organization relationships because it can: (a) render a platform to organize wide-ranging relational constructs; (b) provide insight into evaluating relationship-marketing effectiveness; and (c) diagnose and address problems in relationships. Therefore, we propose a conceptual framework of sport consumer-organization relationship quality that consists of three main components. First, we specify that relationship quality consists of five distinct but related relational constructs (trust, commitment, intimacy, self-connection, and reciprocity). Second, we suggest that relationship quality influences word of mouth, media consumption, licensed-product consumption, and attendance behaviors. Finally, we argue that psychographic factors such as relationship styles, relationship drive, and general interpersonal orientation are moderators, as well as demographic factors such as age, gender, ethnicity, region, and income.

The purpose of this study is to provide a critical review of how consumer satisfaction research in the sport management and the nonsport literatures has developed over the past several decades, and, with that information, to propose a new comparison standard in the formation of sport consumer satisfaction. Though several alternative explanations of consumer satisfaction have been developed, expectancy-disconfirmation framework is the theoretical foundation most used in consumer satisfaction research. However, expectancy-disconfirmation theory does not allow researchers to fully assess the potential complexity of sport consumer satisfaction. Therefore, in addition to recommendations for improving the application of expectancy-disconfirmation, we also propose counterfactual thinking as an alternative comparison standard in determining sport consumer satisfaction. The proposed framework contributes to the literature on sport consumer behavior by illustrating how sport consumers use a “what might have been” rather than “what was” heuristic to explain satisfaction judgments with their sport consumption experiences.

Retaining volunteers is a critical issue for sport organizations utilizing volunteer labor. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the theory of work adjustment, psychological contract theory, two frameworks (person-environment fit and empowerment), and previous empirical results, we proposed and tested three models to explain intention to continue volunteering with 224 volunteers from the Special Olympics State Summer Games. We accepted a model in which Empowerment fully mediated the relationship between Person-Environment Fit and Intention to Continue Volunteering. We also found that Psychological Contract Fulfillment moderated the relationship between Fit and Empowerment.

Despite the growing interest in social media and user-generated content, both academics and practitioners are struggling to understand the value and consequences of social media (e.g., blogs). This study employed a 2 (media source: mainstream/ social media) × 2 (message valence: positive/negative) × 2 (team identification: high/low) between-subjects design on source credibility and attitude toward an article. Positive and negative messages about the university’s varsity men’s basketball team were presented in either the mainstream media (sport magazine) or a user-generated format (blog). The results revealed that message valence had a significant main impact on triggering biased source evaluation and attitude toward the message. In turn, media source had a significant main effect on source expertise, but no main effects were found for trustworthiness and attitude. Team identification moderated the effect of media source on cognitive processing, suggesting that highly identified fans evaluated mainstream content more favorably, whereas less identified fans preferred user-generated content.

The importance of relationship quality in relationship marketing has been well documented; however, very little attention has been paid to the issues of relationship quality in sport consumer behavior contexts. We investigated the cognitive structure of relationship quality (RQ) constructs (Trust, Commitment, Intimacy, Identification, Reciprocity) by comparing a general-specific model to a hierarchical model. In addition we empirically tested the link between RQ and three sport consumer behavioral intentions: attendance, media consumption, and licensed merchandise consumption. The model comparison revealed that individual constructs reflected both the distinct aspects of the specific dimensions of relationship quality and the holistic nature of relationship quality, supporting a general-specific model. Results from the simultaneous equation model indicated that for sport consumers, relationship quality with the team explained 56% of the variance in intention to attend games, 75% of intention to consume sport media, and 66% of intention to purchase licensed merchandise.

Most literature on sport fan behaviors has focused on highly identified or loyal sport fans. While the literature has found that factors influencing current sport fans and their behaviors are related to, and based on, various psychological, social, and cultural factors, only a limited number of studies have investigated what factors initially attract individuals to consume sport. Curiosity has been found to be one of the crucial motivators that initially influence human exploratory behaviors in many domains. Using theories of curiosity, the present review aims to shed light on the role of curiosity in explaining various sport fan behaviors.