Commercialization in Professional Sports: Understanding Consumers’ Perceptions and Responses: An Abstract

Abstract

Growing levels of commercialization in the sports industry bring forward an increasing amount of negative reactions from sports fans. Those reactions span from the formation of a negative attitude towards the involved businesses or clubs to a complete boycott of the sport itself (e.g., Crompton 2014; Howard 1999), which ultimately widens the gap between the sports fans on the one side and business partners, sports organizations, clubs or athletes on the other side.

While existing studies have looked at individual drivers or consequences of commercialization there is little research on how consumers perceive commercialization in professional sports. In particular, no study has made a more comprehensive attempt to capture the nature of commercialization alongside the fans’ attitudes in sports. In order to gain a deeper understanding of consumers’ perceptions of commercialization, semi-structured interviews with socio-demographic diverse sports fans from different countries were conducted and analyzed through the application of an inductive and deductive content analysis (Mayring 2010).

Although commercialization in sports is often referred to as a negative concept in professional sports (Lobmeyer and Weidinger 1992; Slack 2014), our findings from the consumer interviews show that the phenomena associated with commercialization range from negative (e.g., exploitation), neutral (e.g., profit orientation) to positive associations (e.g., professionalization) in which commercialization manifests itself for consumers. Depending on the extent to which those phenomena are present, consumers’ commercialization perception varies, resulting in different internal responses. The internal responses are of a cognitive or emotional nature and translate into either an acceptance, resignation, or opposition mindset, thereby triggering different behavioral consequences.

The consumer-based conceptualization of commercialization and the resulting nomological network developed contribute to the literature by providing insights into the phenomenon of commercialization as seen from a consumers’ viewpoint. With regard to management practice, the study derives implications for sponsors, clubs, athletes and sports organizations on how to adjust their behaviors to lower consumers’ commercialization perceptions.