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The addition of products to the core of matches by professional sports teams (PSTs) has received much coverage. However, there has been limited work as to how their stadiums are used to stage non-sporting events. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how clubs in the English Football League (EFL) use their venues to diversify into other markets.

Secondary sources were used to categorise the teams who played in the EFL by: average division turnover, stadium capacity and stadium age. Semi-structured interviews were held with a member of the commercial teams of 21 clubs.

Clubs use their stadiums to supply a range of products and working with partners is commonplace. These products are targeted at a range of stakeholders, such as supporters, the local community and regionally based organisations. In addition to their own efforts, increased geographical coverage for clubs usually develops in three ways: via internal marketing by local organisations who use the facilities, agents who market the stadium for the club and the EFL who market the league/clubs holistically.

The use of a stadium allows PSTs to diversify by providing new products for new markets. In this instance it has led to the development of capabilities in areas such as conferencing, funerals and weddings.

This is one of the first papers to examine the capabilities developed by PSTs that lie outside the staging of matches.

The cricket Indian Premier League (IPL) was set up in late 2007 and played for the first time in 2008. The IPL is probably the first time in the history of professional team sport that an Asian league has become stronger than a European one. This paper examines the IPL's first year of operation, comparing its organisation with Major League Baseball and the English Football League. The paper concludes that the IPL has more in common with Major League Baseball, although it has, in some respects, proved more flexible than both in its mode of operation.

This study examined the Twenty20 cricket competition launched in England and Wales in 2003. The findings identified that the competition has many of the characteristics which current diffusion models believe to be critical success factors. However, most research focused on American and Australian sports, and two key contextual factors are excluded: both timing and weather have been critical factors in the competition's success.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the range of products and services offered by the professional cricket teams in the UK. To what extent have they added to their core activity of staging matches?

A case study approach was adopted using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The accounts of the 18 teams and the governing body were reviewed to analyse the flow of income within the sport and categorize its sources. Interviews were then held with senior commercial staff of 12 of the teams.

All of the teams had engaged in brand extensions, offering a category of products/services that were more concerned with facilities utilization. These were not aimed at fans of the teams, as with conventional sporting extensions, but at a different market. Though there was some overlap between customers. The use of alliances and joint ventures was common in the provision of these lines.

The research is limited to a single sport, with the portfolio being investigated from a management as opposed to a consumer perspective. The findings are likely to be relevant to other sports teams, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises, where income from the sport alone is insufficient to maintain professional status.

This paper adds to the previous research on typologies of brand extensions in sport by incorporating product/service lines that were aimed at resource utilization and different markets.

This empirical paper aims to assess the multi-dimensional nature of trust in service relationships. Although trust is deemed to be important for managing service relationships there is a dearth of research looking at its multidimensional nature outside of Western markets.

The study is undertaken in three countries: UK, Hong Kong and India (September to November 2010). The sample consists of more than 300 sample members from across the three countries with an approximately even split between each.

The findings show that cognitive trust does not significantly impact affective trust, but the other relationships in the model are supported. Customer ' s disposition to trust impacts both cognitive and overall trust.

The research provides direction for services marketing scholars and practitioners, but there are limitations because not all types of financial institutions are evaluated.

The practical implications of this work are profound given that transnational operations of most retail banks. Understanding trust dimensions aids relationship managers to devise differentiated strategies to build/re-build and maintain long-term trust relationships with customers.

This work extends the understanding of relationships, but by rooting the work in retail banking it provides new insights for academics and practitioners. For service marketing scholars, this study calls into question some of the multi-dimensional nature of trust and for practitioners it can help aid strategy development.

The purpose of this paper is to develop and tests a service excellence model, thus providing a detailed understanding of the key antecedents of service excellence, from a customer ' s perspective. The model presented in this paper is rooted in cross-disciplinary literature and tested amongst customers of UK retail banking services.

Following a systematic approach to scale development, the paper draws on survey data from 260 consumers of retail banking products, with the data collected on national basis in the UK.

The theoretical framework was evaluated using a structural approach. Of the hypothesised antecedents, innovation has the greatest impact on service excellence while reputation the least, as far as customers are concerned.

The research was limited to one research domain, i.e. UK retail banking, and thus it is reasonable to hypothesise that other aspects of service excellence will be more or less relevant for other types of financial services or in other geographic regions.

Given the challenges faced by the retail banking sector, there are implications for practitioners because the authors identified the key antecedents of service excellence. The antecedents can be used by practitioners to help demonstrate excellence on their part and they could differentiate what are homogenous services at a time when the retail banks are going through a period of recovery following the crisis within the sector.

This work complements the understanding of service excellence and provides insight for scholars and practitioners by modelling services for a specific service sector.

The aim of this research was to develop a robust, multi‐dimensional, fully psychometrised questionnaire able to be used in a wide variety of organizations and various different countries for both descriptive and predictive purposes. Presently available categorical and dimensional questionnaire measures were described and evaluated and a brief but critical review of the organizational climate literature executed. A study is described in which two population groups, over 200 British employees and over 300 European employees at all levels, doing a variety of jobs in a large multi‐national transportation company, completed a 108 item multi‐dimensional questionnaire which required them to rate each question on two scales ‐ performance and importance. Cronbach's Alpha indicated that most dimensions had highly satisfactory internal reliability and correlational analysis suggested many of the scales were closely related. These factors were correlated with various other personal (age, sex, years with the company) and organizational features (location, level, job). The potential application of this measure to other occupational settings was discussed, along with its potential use in international analysis.

The implementation of performance management is the responsibility of managers; more importantly, a key part of a frontline manager's role is ensuring that frontline employees are performing by meeting organisational goals. Existing research has shown a lack of focus on the role of frontline managers in the implementation of performance management systems despite plenty of research on the separate topics of frontline managers and performance management. This article aims to understand how frontline managers connect the intended performance management system, through components and processes developed by the human resources department and higher levels of management, with their employees' performance.

This study used a qualitative method, conducting semi-structured interviews with 57 participants from two Singapore public sector organisations to understand the interaction between the formal and informal performance management systems.

The authors found that frontline managers used the formal and informal performance management systems in the organisation to manage the demands of their role. Notably, the expectations that superiors and subordinates have heavily influences how the frontline managers choose to implement their performance management responsibilities.

The article uses systems theory to illustrate and explain the complex and dynamic nature of PM in practice through the FLM's implementation of the formal and informal PM systems. The primary contribution of the study is through demonstrating under what situations do frontline managers use the formal and informal performance systems in a complementary manner within the constraints placed on them.