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Social media enables sport organizations to connect with customers in a dynamic, ubiquitous, and timely manner. Although these organizations routinely use social media, the best practices to improve customer engagement remain elusive. This paper aims to examine National Football League (NFL) teams’ Instagram posts to understand how sport teams can utilize social media to drive customer engagement.

Guided by uses and gratification theory, the author employs a machine learning algorithm to assess the content of NFL teams’ posts from the 2013–2014 season to the 2017–2018 season. The author performs regression analyses to investigate how post topic, together with confounding factors, boost customer engagement.

Results highlight the importance of informational content in eliciting engagement and reveal distinctions in topics deemed “social content” in the literature. The author further identifies variations in how post topics engage sport fans and general customers.

Results provide implications for sport organizations to craft social media content for customer engagement.

A 30-item Sport Interest Inventory (SII) was developed and validated for measuring ten unique motives related to consumer interest at an international sporting event. Spectators (N=1,321) attending five different US venues during the 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup were administered the SII. Analysis revealed that sport and team interest, excitement, supporting women's opportunity in sport, aesthetics and vicarious achievement explained 35 per cent of the variance in spectators' interest in the event. Results provide sport marketers with consumer-based marketing strategies, particularly for women's sport.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a method for solving the multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) problem in which the decision maker can provide the five types of attribute aspirations, namely: benefit type with requirements; cost type with requirements; interval type; benefit type; and cost type.

First, for each type of attribute aspiration, the calculation formula of utility values of alternative concerning attributes is given. Then, using the calculation formulae, the attribute values are transformed into the corresponding utility values. On the basis of this, the overall ranking value of each alternative is calculated. Further, a ranking order of alternatives can be determined according to the obtained overall ranking values.

Research shows that it is necessary to develop the method for MADM with attribute aspirations. The example shows that the proposed method is applicable.

The proposed method can be applied to the selection of wastewater treatment technologies or other areas.

This paper proposes a new MADM method with multiple types of attribute aspirations. It develops and enriches the existing MADM methods.

This paper gives a selective review on some recent developments of nonparametric methods in both continuous and discrete time finance, particularly in the areas of nonparametric estimation and testing of diffusion processes, nonparametric testing of parametric diffusion models, nonparametric pricing of derivatives, nonparametric estimation and hypothesis testing for nonlinear pricing kernel, and nonparametric predictability of asset returns. For each financial context, the paper discusses the suitable statistical concepts, models, and modeling procedures, as well as some of their applications to financial data. Their relative strengths and weaknesses are discussed. Much theoretical and empirical research is needed in this area, and more importantly, the paper points to several aspects that deserve further investigation.

Managing the growing word-of-mouth (WOM) of brand fans has become a new challenge for companies in the fan economy era. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of language intensity of brand fan WOM on customers' willingness to adopt WOM based on psychological resistance theory and to reveal the underlying mechanism of this process.

A research model was developed to test the proposed hypotheses. Two experiments were conducted on an online platform using data from 708 participants. The independent samples t-test and analysis of variance were used to analyze the data.

The results show that, in the context of WOM among brand fans, high-intensity language leads to a lower willingness to adopt than low-intensity language and threats to freedom mediate this effect. Moreover, the restoration postscript moderates the effect of language intensity on threats to freedom and customers' willingness to adopt WOM.

Unlike previous studies that focused on electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) language content, this paper focuses on language intensity to reveal the psychological process of customers' willingness to adopt brand fan WOM. The findings not only enrich the research related to the language effect in eWOM, but also deepen the understanding of the influence effect on brand fan WOM, providing effective guidance for brands to manage fan WOM.

The chapter articulates the transition to and evolution of the commercialisation of Chinese professional football. It is periodised based on major turning points. The research yielded two major findings. First, there exists a distinct ‘Chinese way’ of commercialising football. However, it does not indicate that Chinese football doggedly avoided the Western governance model. For the club governance, Chinese football authorities set about recommending privately operated enterprises, large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises. Second, the commercialisation transitions of professional football in China were triggered by exogenous policy shifts, rather than endogenous changes in market structures, resulting in higher horizontal financial fragility than is associated with the commercialisation model adopted in more developed Western markets. The applicability to voluntary football clubs is assessed as well.

This study aims to develop a conceptual model for GET products that participate in brands’ online communities, based on social cognitive theory (SCT), with environmental factors, personal factors and behavioral factors being used to explore whether users of GET products participate in brand online communities as well as to determine whether participation in a community forum causes users to stick with GET products. In addition, expectancy confirmation is also considered in the research model.

This research examines whether environmental and personal factors have a positive effect on the behavioral factors of Gogoro users, and then further effects on green energy technology (GET) product stickiness for users in online communities. A website was used to distribute links to two Facebook club sites: Gogoro Series 2 Fan Club and the Gogoro Fan Club. The respondents’ qualification criteria were restricted to people who had used Gogoro products and participated in a Gogoro online community. A total of 581 valid responses were collected for structural equation modeling (SEM) analysis, and expectancy confirmation was found to be moderate from a hierarchical regression.

The results of SEM show that virtual interactivity has a positive effect on product-related content, and social norms were found to have significant effects on creating product-related content. Brand community identification, perceived relative advantage and brand knowledge self-efficacy are found to be related to both creating and contributing product-related content. Also, creating product-related content and contributing user participation behaviors influence ET product stickiness.

Online community managers can boost user participation by increasing interaction, and community identification by enhancing users’ perceptions of benefiting from participating in their communities. Companies can also encourage users to create product-related content to increase users’ stickiness to GET products. Further, GET companies can try to enhance users’ intrinsic connection with other community users to increase their brand community identification if they want to increase users’ willingness to participate.

This study adopted SCT to measure the GET product stickiness formation process in an attempt to determine what factors boost user participation based on triadic reciprocality. Also, expectancy confirmation plays an important role in the relationship between community users’ participation behaviors and GET product stickiness. The results indicated that it was appropriate to add virtual interactivity to environmental factors and perceived relative advantage to personal factors to measure users’ participation in an online social community. Actual product users’ online community participation behavior could be a very influential indicator of actual product stickiness formation.

The purposes of this paper is to segment spectators of collegiate football game using a cluster analysis and to determine differences between spectator clusters based on motivations, satisfaction, and demographic characteristics.

A survey instrument was utilized, and a total of 407 usable data were gathered through a convenience sampling method at a main campus in the Southern USA. A discriminant analysis was employed to create cluster profiles including demographic variables not previously included in the clustering procedure. Cluster analysis is a procedure used to determine best group segmentation.

Through a factor-cluster analysis, two distinct groups are identified as attendees of collegiate football games: far-away fans and seasoned sideliners. Knowing the different spectators in event attendance allows marketers of collegiate sport events to effectively target segments and attract larger numbers of visitors to each event. Although the results indicated lower satisfaction with the far-away fans cluster, they are nonetheless spending their money at these events. A concerted effort to better welcome tourists that are supporting the visiting team may help boost their image of the local community and thus increase their spending level.

The current study adds to the literature on sport event research, while providing great insight for researchers and practitioners how to segment their target market. Therefore, it is believed that the results of the present study will help future researchers and industry practitioners make use of the implications and findings to broaden their knowledge about sport marketing.

This study aims to examine the “external effect” of a migrated star player on their domestic sport industries. By exploring the new aspect of star power, this study provides important insight and critical implication to many relevant stakeholders in the professional sports league. Particularly, this is critical under the recent circumstance where the globalization of sports products becomes the central strategic issue of the world-class leagues.

In this paper, the external effect of star players migrated from three Asian leagues (Japan, Korea and Taiwan) to Major League Baseball in the USA, the world-class baseball league, on their domestic league attendance demand was empirically investigated. For the analysis, comprehensive historical data from various reliable sources from each league were collected.

The findings of the paper strongly support the external effect of migrated stars significantly existing in all the three leagues. The effect is consistent across various measurements of migrated star players. More interestingly, the effect was found to be mixed across different leagues; for example, migrated star players increases in domestic league attendance in Japan, while it decreases in Korea and Taiwan. This indicates that the external effect of migrated star players depends on the characteristics of the domestic leagues. In addition, it was found that the external effect was substantial enough to compare to the effect of major demand drivers such as team winning, competitive balance and star power. For managerial implications, this study also provides revenue projections induced by the impact of migrated star players.

This study opens a new chapter related to star power topic and immediately calls for future studies regarding this external effect, particularly, theoretical and behavioral approaches.

Formal orientation programs play a potentially important role in newcomer adjustment, yet research aimed at understanding and improving the effects of these interventions has stagnated in recent years. The purpose of this chapter is to facilitate a redirection of researchers’ attention to such programs, and to suggest ways to integrate this body of research with recent developments in socialization and training literatures.