Teenage motivations for sport related consumption in Australia

Abstract

Sport is a prevalent and pervasive leisure form in many countries and Australia is no exception. Australian consumers spend millions of dollars on sport and recreational pursuits. These pursuits include attending live sporting events, playing sport, and buying sporting merchandise. There is a considerable body of research into people's motivations for attending live sporting events and participating in sport, but it is all from an adult perspective. However, there has been little attention by sport marketing researchers to the motivations of teenage sport consumption. Teenagers are an important socio-economic and demographic group to marketers and with growing numbers they represent the future adult sport consumption public. This research attempts to fill this gap in academic knowledge by investigating teenagers' motivations for sport related consumption including; sport participation, sport spectating, virtual sport consumption through the playing of sport related computer games, and sport merchandise consumption. Based on a large sample of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 living in a regional city in Australia, this study found variation in the specific motivations for the participation in the different sport consumption activities studied and many of these motivations also differed by age and gender. Theoretical contributions of this study include an insight into teenage sport consumption motivation, recommendations for scale adaptations to account for a teenage viewpoint and extension of current sport motivation knowledge to include aspects of sport consumption not previously considered - virtual sport consumption through the use of computer games and sport merchandise consumption. From a practitioner perspective, contributions lie in a greater understanding of teenage motivations which are useful for segmentation decisions, product development considerations and promotional design