Valuable addition to the body of literature about consumer behaviour

Viktor Magnusson
School of Business and Economics, Linnæus University

Not another book about consumer behaviour! Isn’t this already an over-established area? Might it be another “emperor’s new clothes” that I’m holding in my hand? Well, it turned out that it wasn’t, and I absolutely see the relevance of the book Sport Consumer Behaviour: Marketing Strategies in the market.

The book is the second edition, where its content has been revised into a new structure, and a new chapter about technology and sport consumer experiences has been added. Part 1 – The Sport Consumer Marketplace – addresses topics like the sport product, the market for sport, market research, segmentation, and brand management. Part 2 – Sport Consumers as Decision Makers – deals with the issue of the consumer as a decision-maker and the psychological process that lies behind consumers’ attachment to a sport product. Part 3 – Sport Consumers as Individuals – presents the underlying mechanisms that explain our behaviour, like motivation, involvement, engagement, attitudes, identification, personality, and satisfaction. The last part – Sport Consumers in their Social World – discusses the external influence on our behaviour like culture, family, reference groups, and social class. Within this part, there is also a final chapter that addresses how technology affects the consumer experience, both positively and negatively.

If you compare sport and recreational contexts to a more general context of marketing, two things stand out and are crucial to understand if you are working with sport and recreation marketing: involvement and engagement.

I work at a Swedish university and mainly do my teaching within marketing in general, often with a focus on consumer behaviour, service management, and branding. But I also do courses within sport management. Throughout my years at the university, I have come across multiple books about consumer behaviour, and my experience is that they are quite similar in content, no matter the author or publisher. This book, Sport Consumer Behaviour: Marketing Strategies, is no different when it comes to the content where you get to read about most of the fundamental models and ideas that have shaped the subject of consumer behaviour. But what makes the book different and worth reading is, of course, the focus on sport and recreation. And the book deals with this in a really good way. The authors have put extensive work into tying together classic consumer behaviour theories with the sport/recreation context, presenting research results from relevant studies to show the reader how it works in sport and recreation. The research presented is not only US-based, which is common in older sport management literature; instead it covers studies from countries and cultures from most parts of the world.

The biggest strength of the book is that it suits practitioners just as well as students. Throughout the different chapters, you get to read about strategies and how to approach problems. I can see this book being used by e.g., marketers in sport organizations, city planners working with destination branding, or by self-employed people working with sports and recreation, just as well as I can see it being used in a Sport Management course at a university.

Another strength of the book is the in-depth discussion of different sport/recreation-specific issues. If you compare sport and recreational contexts to a more general context of marketing, two things stand out and are crucial to understand if you are working with sport and recreation marketing: involvement and engagement. The book deals with this in a good way, discussing both involvement and engagement as a participant and as a spectator. Another thing I like about the book is that it specifically deals with the challenge of sports/recreation being a service, which creates challenges for both the marketer and the consumer since the product is mostly intangible. This is problematized throughout the different chapters but also dealt with in a specific chapter called “Perception of service quality and customer satisfaction”.

My review so far has been really positive, and I do think this is an excellent book both for practitioners and for students in a course within sports marketing. But as always, there is room for improvement. The first thing that strikes me is the small space the external influence on consumer behaviour gets. It’s one chapter that deals with crucial factors like culture (e.g., some scholars claim culture has the biggest impact on our behaviour!), family and reference group. This chapter is also placed second last, which for me signals less importance. For me, this is central, and it needs to be dealt with more in-depth and earlier in a book, since it has such a huge effect on e.g., involvement and engagement in sport. In the first edition of the book, this chapter was placed much earlier in the book, in part 2. Why it has been moved is unclear. Another thing that might be more annoying to the reader than it affects the understanding of the topic is that the text in some chapters hasn’t been updated for the new edition. Throughout the book, the text refers to other chapters to help the reader understand how things align or to clarify what is discussed. But in some places, the text refers to topics as if you have read about them, but you haven’t since the topic in this new edition is placed further on in the structure. There are a few places where this is an issue, but for most parts, the referencing to different chapters works. There are also some minor factual errors and spelling mistakes which could easily have been avoided with a thorough proofreading before publishing.

So, does the book work in a Swedish context?

We Swedes are for the most part proud of how sports, in general, are organized in our country, where we have the 51% rule, basically saying that at least 51% of a sports club that is incorporated needs to be owned by its members. This means that a club or league cannot be privately owned in Sweden. Much of the work within sport organizations is voluntary contributions, which might be an issue if the organization wants to be become more professional. A general issue in many Sport Management books is that they are “Americanised” and present the topic and strategies based on how sports work in the US. But I don’t get that impression from this book. Sport Consumer Behaviour: Marketing Strategies is written by scholars working in the USA, Australia, and Greece, and they use research from different parts of the world in the book to build their case. The strategies discussed are more of a general character, and I absolutely think the book is applicable for both practitioners and students in Sweden and other Nordic countries in general.

Copyright © Viktor Magnusson 2024