Unit -01 Test PDF

Sport consumption is often different from typical product consumption, such as buying and using appliances, electronics, furniture, and cosmetics. Sport consumption is distinct, with the following unique aspects: - Often experiential and subjective, with individual sport consumers each placing d...

Sport consumption is often different from typical product consumption, such as buying and using appliances, electronics, furniture, and cosmetics. Sport consumption is distinct, with the following unique aspects: - Often experiential and subjective, with individual sport consumers each placing different meaning or value on similar products and experiences (e.g., how meaningful and valuable it is to attend a Toronto Maple Leafs regular season game will be different for each of you) - Creates a range of emotions (often intense) and passion (e.g., people may be moved to tears watching their favourite athlete win a gold medal) - Includes an element of uncertainty (e.g., unclear how a tennis match is going to be played and who will win) - Includes multiple interactions and transactions with the sport organization across an extended period (e.g., interactions with ticket scanning, bathroom usage, and concessions all before making it to your seat at a stadium or arena) The Sport Experience Design (SX) framework presented in Figure 1.1 provides a framework to help capture and illustrate why sport consumption is so distinct. Specifically, for sport consumption to occur, sport organizations (e.g., the Boston Red Sox) develop and sell a product or experience to the sport user (e.g., us). The intersection, or overlap, between the sport organization and user is the sport context or the environment managed by the sport organization that the consumer navigates throughout their sport consumption experience. Each individual consumer, or each one of you, has a unique personality, demographic characteristics, and needs and wants that influence how we consume sports. Hence, it is important to understand each user or sport fan to understand how they experience sport events (e.g., attending a game) and/or purchase sport products (e.g., buy memorabilia). Figure 1.1 Sport Experience Design (SX) framework (Funk, 2017) Broadly speaking, a significant portion of this course will relate to this investigation into sport fans so that we can better understand them and their behaviours. For sport organizations, this line of inquire can prove helpful to identify how to improve experiences with the hope of increasing consumer retention, spend, and other important business metrics. This is illustrated throughout this unit’s Learning Activity. For society, understanding sport fans and their behaviours can help identify and critically assess the potential positive and negative impacts of fandom on society. Finally, for us sport fans (or friends and family of sport fans), it gives us an understanding of why we might react the way we do or spend so much time and money investing in a sport team. Thus, without further ado, let’s begin our study of sport fans! The experience blueprint represents a diagram of touchpoints encountered by consumers. Often these touchpoints are arranged in a chronological sequence related to interactions that occur before, during, and after buying and using a sport product. Given the vast number of potential interactions possible, the blueprint is typically simplified by identifying key touchpoints that all consumers encounter or ones for a specific target segment (e.g., first-time female participants between ages of 18 and 30). Normally, touchpoints included are controlled by the sport business but can also include interactions beyond management control (e.g., mass transit to a game, posting on social media platforms, mobile devices). The blueprint can be used to gain insight by having customers rate their level of satisfaction with an interaction. A simplified consumer experience blueprint for a 10-km running event is presented in Table 1.1. Table 1.1 Sport consumer experience blueprint Table 1.1 illustrates a blueprint of four stages including pre-event, day before event, race day, and post-event. Within each stage, key touchpoints encountered are listed. Research can be conducted at the running event by observing and recording interactions occurring in real time or interviewing participants about what they liked and disliked about the event. Often information is collected via an online post-event survey sent to all participants asking how satisfied they were with interactions. For example, completed surveys could reveal that participants found the registration process on the website frustrating and day of event travel information not helpful. Internal data can also be used to evaluate some key interactions as well as support survey results on interactions. For example, website analytics indicates 57 visitors started the registration process but did not complete it. In addition, website traffic leading up to the event was lower compared to previous years. Given this insight, a website audit should be conducted examining accessibility, task definition, and usefulness to improve the experience. The benefit of the blueprint is that consumption can be deconstructed into stages, allowing a business to evaluate the design of touchpoints and level of satisfaction at each one. This deconstruction shifts the evaluation of the race experience from an overall assessment to a series of stand-alone evaluations for specific touchpoints. For example, asking participants whether they were satisfied with a 10-km race requires a holistic assessment combining multiple interactions, some of which may have been positive and others negative. As a result, gathering unique information on specific touchpoints (e.g., website, security, swag bag, and water stations) provides actionable insight. Overall, the concept of sport experience design highlights how various design-relevant factors influence user-organization-context interactions. These interactions also provide a unique understanding of cognitive and behavioural responses of key target segments and the management actions necessary to enhance satisfaction. As a result, this knowledge can help optimize consumer buying and using experience which increases consumer demand allowing the sport business to generate resources to be successful and sustainable. However, designing an optimal sport experience also requires recognizing the potential influence of individual differences and environmental factors, some of which are not under management control. These influential factors are introduced and discussed in the following section within a sport consumer behaviour model.