Club fan shop or not? A conjoint analysis of online jersey purchase behavior
Sport, Business and Management
ISSN: 2042-678X
Article publication date: 20 August 2020
Issue publication date: 8 March 2021
Abstract
Purpose
The relevance of merchandise for professional football clubs is uncontroversial. Especially the constantly growing e-commerce sales elicits disruptive market changes such as global brand visibility or data-driven customer relationship management strategies. To exhaust these possibilities, it is a precondition that merchandising costumers choose the official online fan shop as the first choice channel instead of a third-party supplier. Thus, the purpose of this study is to figure out if the club as a retailer and the loyalty to a club influence the fans' channel choice when purchasing licensed sports merchandise online.
Design/methodology/approach
To do so, a choice-based conjoint analysis for a jersey purchase embedded in an online questionnaire was conducted (sample: n = 589) to investigate the importance of the online supplier, relative to the tangible factors price, shipping speed and free added values and the influence of fan loyalty within the e-commerce purchase channel choice.
Findings
The findings reveal that the price has the highest relative importance (47%), but, as a sport specific peculiarity, the relative importance of the online supplier (22%) is higher than added values (20%) and shipping speed (11%). But, these overall findings are significantly affected by the level of fan loyalty. Based on the findings, implications that influence the fans' decision-making practices are derived for clubs.
Originality/value
This study is the one of the first in sports management research, focusing straight on the purchase channel importance (affected by fan loyalty) when purchasing merchandising online.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Citation
Habenstein, D., Kirchhoff, K. and Schlesinger, T. (2021), "Club fan shop or not? A conjoint analysis of online jersey purchase behavior", Sport, Business and Management, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 54-71. https://doi.org/10.1108/SBM-10-2019-0102
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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