Men's Versus Women's Collegiate Basketball Customers: Attitudinal Favorableness and the Environment

Abstract

This article sheds light on how fans, as consumers of sports, perceive environmental factors at collegiate sporting events and how these consumer perceptions relate to positive affect toward the event for men's versus women's intercollegiate basketball customers in the USA. Gaining a deeper understanding of environmental factors and their relation to attitudinal favorableness is important as sports marketers continue to strive to satisfy sports consumers better. This work is especially important because environmental factors are often under the control of sports marketers — as opposed to uncontrollable factors such as winning percentage and player personnel. A mail survey was distributed to exiting customers at four basketball games at a large northwestern US university (two men's games and two women's games, n = 759). The overall favorableness of women's basketball customers exceeded the overall favorableness of men's customers on environmental factors tested. Women's customers placed more emphasis on atmospheric factors such as the courteousness of staff as well as facility and hospitality factors such as seating and concessions in rating their overall favorableness. Men's customers emphasized secondary entertainment factors, such as the band, as important environmental sources of favorableness.

Citation

Kahle, L.R., Aiken, D., Dalakas, V. and Duncan, M. (2003), "Men's Versus Women's Collegiate Basketball Customers: Attitudinal Favorableness and the Environment", International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, Vol. 5 No. 2, pp. 54-68. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSMS-05-02-2003-B005