Turismo deportivo y comunicación de marketing Aplicación de Mapeos de Empatía en el Turismo de Espectadores de Fútbol

Abstract

The theoretical framework on which this presentation is based is the Empathy Map, a tool of the Business Model Generation (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010). This model provides a means to structure consumer profiles coherently or to develop hypotheses about their profiles. The aim of this study is to characterize Portuguese football spectator tourists using the Empathy Map as a contribution to the development of effective marketing communication strategies by the football clubs. We made use of a national survey to assess the behaviour of football spectators as sports tourists and the Empathy Map was applied to the results. The survey questions were tested through exploratory factor analysis: to evaluate the socio-economic tourists’ characteristics we applied an ANOVA test. A review of current literature on consumer behaviour, marketing communications and sports tourism is also presented. The article produces a visual map in order to demonstrate how the technique can be used to support decision making in sports tourism and marketing communication. Our results reveal that the football spectators vibrate with victories, hear friends and family, and are influenced by digital media: they carefully observe the teams in the game, the friends, and the animation of the event. They also celebrate the goals, they participate actively in the event and support their team. On the other hand, the football spectators as sports tourists are concerned about the safety and about the access to the stadiums. This instrument provides an example of how sports managers can get to know the behaviour of football spectator tourists more deeply, together with the environment and the factors that influence it. This technique can thus be an aid to the development of more effective decisions in the scope of animation in the stadiums, security inside and outside the stadiums, in accesses to the stadiums and communication through the web and social networks appropriate to various targets. The empirical application of the Empathy Map is to characterize football spectators as sports tourists. This framework has been used to understand the consumer profiles of micro, small and medium enterprises, large companies and start-ups. However, it has never been used to characterize the football spectator and its empirical application is unusual.