The purpose of this study is to help perform Cause-Related Marketing systematically by investigating causal relations between spectators' attitude of professional soccer teams toward Cause-Related Marketing and Team image, Team identification, and Tea...
The purpose of this study is to help perform Cause-Related Marketing systematically by investigating causal relations between spectators' attitude of professional soccer teams toward Cause-Related Marketing and Team image, Team identification, and Team loyalty. The equipment support team for youth soccer which represents the important and identical public beneficial activity of professional soccer teams is selected in advance investigation for the study. The home team spectators of 13 professional soccer teams are subjected except a nonprofit team, Gwangju Sangmu soccer team. 978 questionnaires are distributed and 948 questionnaires are used for data analysis. This data analysis is used by SPSS 12.0 version statistic package and AMOS 4.0 program are to prove a hypothesis. The result of the study is following.
First, the spectators' attitude of professional soccer teams toward Cause-Related Marketing has positive influence to team image.
Second, the spectators' attitude of professional soccer teams toward Cause-Related Marketing has positive influence to team identification.
Third, team image has positive influence to team identification.
Forth, team imagehas positive influence to team loyalty.
Fifth, team identification has positive influence to team loyalty.
Marketing in modern society has changed its concept to 'social marketing'. It means that marketing should expand its way to satisfy entire social welfare along with understanding needs in target market and achieving customer satisfaction more efficiently than competitors. Because the society asks social responsibility to companies, professional soccer teams' marketing strategy, connected to public beneficial activity, could link to positive impact for revitalizing professional soccer, in the aspect of making place for professional soccer team to perform and try social responsibility and offering satisfaction to spectators who participate in public beneficialactivity directly or indirectly.
Meanwhile, Cause-Related Marketing activity can be relatedto personal value inclination. So public beneficial activity by professional soccer teams should be seen as charitable and truthful activity to spectators and should have definite public beneficial goal to get attention and support from society(community). Furthermore, each people(players, teams, and spectators), who are connected to professional soccer team, have to participate in the activity. If professional soccer teams investigate the program which could lead the participation of companies as sponsors also, they could reduce their financial burden and the companies could reduce the obligation, participating social beneficial activity in the part of returning their portion of profit to society. With the program, professional soccer teams and companies would not lose their customers and it could be win-win marketing for both of them. And the evaluation about how spectators think about Cause-Related Marketing, executing by professional soccer teams and whether spectators are increased, has to be performed periodically.