Understanding the importance of sport stadium visits to teams and cities through the eyes of online reviewers

Abstract

This study explores the relationships among sport stadium visitors' experiences, satisfaction, team brand image, and destination image. A text mining approach was first used to analyse 26,538 individual reviews from 17 European sport stadiums on TripAdvisor. The online reviews were then used as input to create a word frequency of each individual review and construct a structural equation model. Results indicate that the visitor experience had a strong impact on team brand image and a moderate effect on destination image. Satisfaction mediated the influence of the visitor experience on team brand image, but not on destination image. Team brand image exerted a significant but small impact on destination image. These findings show that stadium visits impact the marketing of both host teams and cities. City, leisure and stadium managers should therefore coordinate their efforts to highlight teams as part of a city's cultural brand to generate image-based benefits for both.

Restaurant containment measures and perceived service quality: implications for future pandemics

“…When the indicator’s outer loading is less than 0.50 but significant, its removal should be considered. However, removing the indicator requires careful analysis, as its elimination may omit unique parts of the variable’s composition, thus reducing its theoretical validity (Ramos et al , 2023). Following these recommendations, the Empathy indicator was removed (outer loading = 0.103; p- value = 0.082).…”

“…Reviews that do not follow the standard pagination format may not have been captured due to using a web scrapper. Although a panel of experts validated the dictionary, this process will always contain inherent subjectivity (Ramos et al , 2023), influencing final results. The accuracy and authenticity of TripAdvisor’s online reviews could not be confirmed.…”

“…TripAdvisor, founded in 2000, is a top opinion site with 859 million reviews and 459 million monthly visits (Cassar et al , 2023). Following Ramos et al (2023) approach, mixed text mining and PLS-SEM methods were used to analyze restaurant reviews. PLS-SEM suits theory development research, owing to its flexibility with formative measures and single-item use (Hair et al , 2019; Richter et al , 2020).…”

“…First, a random check was carried out on 5% of the reviews to confirm whether the terms were associated with the items. Second, a panel of three independent marketing (2) and tourism (1) experts validated the dictionary (Ramos et al , 2023). The experts could add or eliminate terms or reallocate them to other theoretical constructs.…”

Mapping research in marketing: trends, influential papers and agenda for future research

“…By using PLS-SEM, marketing researchers can explore complex relationships among variables, test research hypotheses, identify the relative importance of different influencers and assess the validity and reliability of the measured variables (Sarstedt et al, 2019). It is frequently used in research involving the modeling of theoretical constructs, such as customer satisfaction (Ramos et al, 2022), brand image (Kunkel et al, 2020) or perceived quality (Ariffin et al, 2021) research. Surprisingly, there are no articles from 2018 in the top 10 most cited articles.…”