Why we watch, what we watch?
Sport & Consumer related drivers of sport watching behaviour

 Master thesis
Jos Brittijn

Sport is the most important side issue in life
Kees Jansma, sports journalist of the Netherlands

Executive Summary

This research gives new insights in what drives sport viewers to watch a certain sport on television.   Sport has such popularity that large portions of TV programming, live shows, newspapers and Internet media are constituted to this industry (Whitson, 1998). Companies all over the world are trying to catch pieces of this interesting industry by spending substantial amounts of marketing expenditure in the form of advertising and sponsoring, to create brand awareness among the sport fans. Sponsorships and advertising can contribute to the difficult task of differentiating a brand from its competitors, adding value to the brand and creating top of mind awareness by potential customers.                                                   

Sport Fans
Gantz and Wenner (1995) concluded that sport fans are different
in comparison to all other types of fans in their viewing behaviour. Sport fans are trying to enjoy a sport event as long as possible. They think about an upcoming game way before it actually begins by searching information about it on the web, in newspapers and talking about it with their friends. This is the big difference in comparison to any other type of program. Sports fans relive the game again and again, which is not the case with other television programs. Sports fans are more likely to identify themselves with the competing athletes as well as with the other fans of a particular sporting event. People like to be a part of a group.  For some people their fanship is considered as a significant part of
their personal identity (Bryant & Raney 2000). This illustrates
the value of the sport fan and the importance of identifying the
motivations of those sport fans why they watch a certain sport.

Psychological motivations
While most literature concerning sport motivations has focussed on sport participation, quantifiable research on the viewing motivations of sport fans was still fragmented and inconclusive. McDonald, Milne and Hong (2002) did research from a psychological point of view to identify the reason for sport viewers to watch a certain sport but they used the same instruments to measure the motives for sport viewers and participants. More decisive results were obtained by focussing merely on the motivations from a viewer’s perspective. Viewers have more opportunities to absorb advertising and promotion messages than active athletes who are focussing more on their own sport achievements than possible commercial messages somewhere around the track.  The fourteen factors representing the psychological motives for watching sports by a sports viewer on television are: sensation seeking, stress reduction, physical attractiveness, curiosity, affiliation, social facilitation, self-esteem, competition, achievement, mastery, aggression, aesthetics, value development, and self-actualization.

Characteristics of a sport
Rather than focussing on a single theory based on sport psychology, the focus is also aimed at the characteristics of a sport. Sports differ on a number of criteria such as team vs. individual, length of the game, the number of points scored during a match etc. All those differences can make a given sport attractive for one person and unattractive for another. This research assumed that sport characteristics are also important for watching a certain sport. Thus, in effort to build a theory of sport spectatorship, various sport characteristic constructs have been collected to find possible correlations between sport characteristics and the characteristics of a sport viewer. The various sport characteristic are: individual vs. team, outdoor vs. indoor, level of aggressiveness, human body vs. sport equipment, entertainment value, determination of the winner, artistic level, predictability of the outcome, understanding the rules of the game, the playfield and ballgames. For a variety of sports all those sport characteristics were evaluated by important members of a certain sport to create a sport characteristic index. In this index, which can be found in table F.1 of appendix F, individual scores per sport per sport characteristic can be found. 

Similar to the research of McDonald, Milne and Hong (2002), this study also provides an insight into how consumer motivations differ across a variety of sports. A table (table 5.4) has been produced in this study that gives an overview of the average mean scores per consumer characteristic per sport and consequently whether a sport scores high or low for a variety of consumer characteristics.

Although the mean scores of this table can’t provide decisive conclusion, it even so gives new insights to the sport marketers advertisers if the higher or lower mean scores are somewhere to be expected by logical reasoning or can be sustained by earlier studies. From another angle, psychological differences in the motivation of people who choose to watch different sports can also be found in the involvement of a sport viewer. Sport viewers who are highly involved into sports have different psychological watching motivations than sport viewers who are watching sport at a lower interest rate.

Why watching a certain sport on TV
The primary goal of this thesis was to assess which motivations are influencing the choice for watching a certain sport on television. For sport related businesses it is interesting to know if some sport characteristics match with certain characteristics of the viewer. Specific market strategies can be built upon a strong relation between some of the sport and consumer characteristics. This research indicated that watching a certain sport is not only determined by psychological or sociological motivations but that the unique sport characteristic of a particular sport contributes to the decision making spectrum of watching a certain sport. Sport characteristics can contribute in grouping different sports based on a certain quality for more detailed segmentation approaches. The relation between stress reduction and team sports for example can give businesses that are offering relaxation products more insights which sports are more appropriate to advertise their products. With the help of table 5.4 sport related businesses can determine which sports are matching their product features the best. Is a product meant to bring family and friends together than the mentioned table can be accessed or the company can explore a relation between social facilitation and different sport characteristics to detect which sports are most suitable to be used as a target market. This illustrates that the match between products features and psychological motivations in the sport market with the combination of sport characteristics provides valuable information for managers of sport disciplines, television networks producers, merchandisers, and corporate sponsors to better understand their potential customers.  The increasingly amounts of marketing spending in form of advertising and sponsoring makes it relevant to identify what types of people are attracted by a certain type of sport and how those potential customers can be approached. As been established by  Pechmann & Steward (1990), sponsorships and advertising can contribute to the difficult task of differentiating a brand from its competitors, adding value to the brand and creating top of mind awareness by potential customers. Knowing your audience is therefore crucial to become a successful player in the difficult sports market.