Exploring the Demand Aspects of Sports Consumption and Fan Avidity

Abstract

The sports industry is one of the world's fastest-growing business sectors, and its primary source of revenue is ultimately derived from sports fans. However, little is known about fans' allocations of time, effort, and financial expenditures to the sports they care most about or how they determine their allocations. The objective of our research is to explore the dimensions of sports consumption and fan avidity, and the nature of heterogeneity of such demand aspects vis-à-vis derived market segments. We develop a new constrained latent-structure multidimensional scaling procedure to uncover the underlying dimensions of sports consumption and fan avidity for student college football fans at a large university, and simultaneously derive latent market segments to explore demand heterogeneity. We collected data from a sample of student football fans from a large US public university known for its excellence in college football. We developed 35 expressions of manifestations of fan avidity and investigated how these college fans follow and support their football team. We then extracted four interpretable dimensions and four market segments with the application of this new spatial multidimensional scaling model. This paper discusses the managerial implications of applying this new latent-structure procedure to this college football context.