Scheduled for Research Consortium Sport Management, Recreation and Leisure Poster Session, Friday, April 28, 2006, 1:15 PM - 2:45 PM, Convention Center: Exhibit Hall Poster Area I


Interactivity in Use and Gratification for New Sports Marketing Strategy

Moonki Hong and Taesoo Ahn, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL

According to the ESPN official Website (2005), its monthly unique users is 15.1 million. As Mahony and Howard (2001) asserted that successful sport managements depends on internet marketing and other new communication technologies, the future of sport marketing on the Internet is getting promising. In this research, the researchers investigate online users' sports Websites use behavior and their satisfaction based on the Uses and Gratification approach. The uses and gratifications (U&G) theory focuses on the explanations for media user's motivations and associated behaviors. A basic assumption of U&G theory is that users are actively involved in media usage and interact highly with the communication media (Eighmey & McCord 1998; Korgaonkar & Wolin 1999). Chen and Wells (1999) made Internet use scales and suggested three online use variables; entertainment, information, and organization. Applying the scales developed by Chen and Wells (1999), the researchers added another variable, interactivity. Based on interactivity arguments, the researchers measured interactive features in three aspects; two-way communication (e-mail), user's control (bulletin board use), and real time information change (online update, multimedia use, and online fantasy game). 379 Florida State University students who use sports Websites were randomly selected and analyzed. All variables of this research achieved more than .82 reliability scores. Exploratory factor analysis was conducted to see how U&G variables are grouped. The researchers found that interactivity variables are included in a group consisting with entertainment, informativeness, and organization. The coefficients in rotated factor analysis matrix of all media use variables are more than .75; entertainment (.82), informativeness (.81), organization (.78), and interactivity (.77). Next, the researchers examined correlations between four media use variables and gratification variable. All correlations are more than .70. The correlations with gratification are .85 (entertainment), .81 (informativeness), .75 (organization), and .71 (interactivity). The researchers also measured online user's sports Website use time and frequency to see user's behavior. Using these variables, relationship between gratification and sports Website use are studied (correlation coefficient: .72). Finally, the result of SEM indicated that the overall fit of structural model was acceptable. The results (&#61539;²=88.9, p<.05, NFI=.92, CFI=.912, AGFI=.87, RMSEA=.95) uncovered a significant relationship between entertainment, informativeness, and interactivity and sports Website use frequency (r=.59, p<.05) and no significant relationship between organization and sports Website use time (r=.20, p>.05). These findings suggested that interactivity may be considered as one of important elements when a sports Website are designed for sports marketing strategy tool.
Keyword(s): administration/mgmt, athletics/sports, sport management

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