Consumer perceptions of service quality attributes at sporting events

Building on existing knowledge in the service marketing literature, this study investigates the importance of service attributes used by sports fans when evaluating the quality of their service experience at sporting events. A pool of 35 attributes was generated based on sports marketing and service quality literature, and pretest information provided from an MBA Services Marketing class and two undergraduate Sports Marketing classes. Cooperation was obtained from the athletic department of a university from a major athletic conference in the southeast. The sample was drawn from fans attending four basketball games during the month of February. The data were analyzed as follows. First, the mean importance value for each of the sports marketing service quality attributes was calculated. Next, the 35 attribute importance items were factor analyzed. Nine factors emerged from the data. The interpretation of these factors lead to the following labels (in order of variance explained): (1) employees, (2) price, (3) facility access, (4) concessions, (5) fan comfort, (6) game experience, (7) showtime, (8) convenience, and (9) smoking. After conducting the exploratory factor analysis, differences were examined in the mean importance values of these factors across a variety of demographic and fan identification characteristics.