Abstract

Triathlons and their events are in a new era in the consumption of sport. Because of this increased funding more professionals are needed to understand what attracts sports consumers to what is seen as a gruelling but enjoyable multi sports event. 

For affective marketing and event management, practioners need to understand more and more what decisions are made when the sports consumer makes a choice for a particular sports event.

This study is focused at the National Governing Body for the sport of Triathlon in the United Kingdom and also the Regional/ local event managers and marketers. Drawing upon marketing and consumer behaviour literature, the primary aim of this research was to investigate from the consumer perspective how their internal variables during the decision making process of consumer behaviour affects the selection of sports event, namely triathlon. To establish this information, data was drawn upon previous participants of a triathlon event, then a further investigation into what decisions were made from triathlon consumer’s perspective when selecting an event.

A self administered piloted questionnaire was done in January (2005) with twelve active local triathletes. A further 60 were then posted and electronically mailed to previous participants of a Triathlon event 2005 at the end of January (2005). The consumer’s abilities ranged from the recreational participant through to the elite athlete and the questionnaire contained eighteen questions incorporating a variety of ordinal and nominal questions as well as likert scale questions. The questionnaires were both returned electronically and by post.

The response rate was fairly high at 92% (n=55), respondents represented the sample frame representing a cross section of gender, age and abilities.  The quantitative data was analysed via SPSS 13.0 which is a statistical package. This revealed a variety of statistical results of approximately twenty with statistical findings (P<0.05). ). Event selection was made from athletes' experiences from internal factors of what they held in memory to what they wished to achieve in the sport. Interestingly enough, all the respondents came from one of the three disciplines in the sport.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.