Search results

Sport management research that examines children as a distinct group of sport consumers is sparse, and therefore the authors know relatively little about how and why children become fans of sport teams. The purpose of this paper is to explore the game-day experiences of children in order to better understand how these experiences allow children to socialize into the team community and become fans of the team.

The authors examine this through exploratory observational analysis and 26 semi-structured interviews with children at professional sporting events.

Among the results, it was found that children primarily focus on exploring ways to build membership in the fan community as opposed to initially building connections to the team itself. In addition, those children that watched the games with their peers demonstrated greater in-game emotional responses than those children that viewed the game with family.

This study provides support for the importance of community membership in the initial stages of sport team fandom as well as the varying effects of different groups within fan communities on child fans. However, further research is needed to increase the generalizability of the results.

It is recommended that sport teams increasingly target groups that will bring children to games with their peers in order to enhance their game experience and increase their socialization into fandom.

This paper is one of the first in sport management to directly look to better understand children and the ways in which they become fans of sports teams.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the moderating influence of Multi‐item List of Value (MILOV) on credit card attributes, age, and gender in credit use among Indian customers. The research examines the impact of “lifestyle” variables (convenience, use patterns, and status) on credit card use.

Data were collected through mall intercept technique in six metropolitan cities of India. A self‐administered questionnaire was distributed to customers visiting the malls.

Use and convenience emerged as the major determinants of credit card use among Indian customers. Use, convenience, and status attributes were moderated by “sense of belonging” and “sense of fulfilment” dimensions of MILOV. Young customers were likely to use credit cards.

The study does not examine the influence of customer income, occupation, and education on credit card use, as many customers were not willing to disclose the information. These demographic factors can influence customers' perception towards credit card ownership and use.

The findings can be of immense use to international and Indian banks in marketing of credit cards. The convenience attribute can be emphasized to instill confidence among consumers and motivate them to use credit cards.

There is no previous research on Indian credit cards which examines the influence of “lifestyle” and values on its use among Indian customers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between customer service skills and customers' loyalty through examining the mediation effect of customer satisfaction dimensions in Jordan's mobile service operators.

To achieve the research objectives, data were collected from 1,350 subscribers in Jordan from which 1,007 were valid for the analysis. Utilizing structural equation modeling, and after a series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the authors tested an integrated model of customer service skills and customer loyalty through examining the meditational effects of customer service satisfaction dimensions on the relationship between customer service skills and customer loyalty.

It was found that three of customer service skills components, namely; reputation building skills, nonverbal communication skills, and customer service culture have positive relationships with customer service satisfaction dimensions (overall, functional, and technical customer satisfaction). Also, overall customer service satisfaction and technical customer service satisfaction dimensions fully mediated the relationships between customer service skills and customer loyalty.

This is the first attempt to investigate the relationship between customer service skills and customer loyalty through customer service satisfaction dimensions as mediators, either in Jordan or other developing countries. The authors' results also provide significant managerial implications on how to acquire and retain loyal customers in today's highly competitive telecommunications market, and the vital role of customer service satisfaction dimensions on the relationship between customer service skills and customer loyalty.

This article examines how geographic location (i.e. local or nonlocal) influences fans’ communicative convergence or distinctiveness in the context of an informal online fan community (i.e. Twitter [X]). Nonlocal fans, who live geographically distant from the team they support, derive distinctiveness and belonging from supporting a team from afar. This study considers how these needs materialize in online communication.

Text mining and textual analysis were employed to collect and evaluate tweets (N = 12,865) in terms of expressed emotion. Tweets were evaluated using the NRC VAD sentiment lexicon (i.e. valence, arousal, dominance) and then categorized based on geographic location and in-group/out-group status. The resulting groups were then analyzed with a two-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to examine how geographic location relates to the expressed emotion of tweets.

The findings indicate nonlocal fans expressed statistically greater arousal compared to local online community members, reflecting their distinctiveness as nonlocal fans. Nonlocal and local fans expressed similar degrees of valence and dominance in their language, suggesting nonlocal fans converge communication behavior, seeking social approval from the salient online fan community.

This study suggests that geographic location influences communication behavior in online fan communities. Moreover, nonlocal fans may be valuable, and underutilized, advocates for sports teams in online community settings.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of values of materialism on cognitive and affective impulsiveness and responsible financial behavior among young adults.

A large-scale study (n = 483) was conducted on a sample of young adults 18 to 25 years of age in Croatia.

The research found that materialism has no direct effect on responsible financial behaviour (RFB), however, cognitive impulsiveness fully mediates the relationship of all three there three elements of materialism, centrality, success and happiness and RFB. Affective impulsiveness has no effect on the relationship. Furthermore, only materialism as centrality strongly and positively influences cognitive and affective impulsiveness.

Presented conclusions could be used by policymakers as guidelines for developing educational plans and curriculum to build financial capability and consumer protection among young adults and could be helpful for brand management activities targeting young people purchase decisions.

This paper’s ultimate purpose is to uncover the mechanism and the power of materialism on impulsiveness and responsible financial behavior. The paper’s originality is established by the focus on the investigation of materialism as an antecedent factor of impulsiveness and by questioning the nature of the relationship between materialism and responsible financial behavior through the mediating effect of impulsiveness.