Abstract
The purpose of this study was to examine the consuming patterns that influences the consumer types and to develop the demand analysis of professional baseball applied by gravity model. The detail purpose of this study is as follows. First, examine the consuming patterns of the spectator in professional baseball to establish marketing strategy and market segmentation. Second, inspect the spectator behavior for market segmentation in professional baseball. Third, seek out the factors that influence the consumer types and develop the predictable model for consumer patterns. Fourth, discover the suitability of the predictable model that analysed by gravity model which is representative in analysing interaction. The sample is of this study was collected from Seoul Jamsil baseball stadium that is home ground for both LG Twins and Doosan Bears professional baseball team. Collecting data period was from August to September in 2002. Total 2,664 spectators responded home games in Jamsil baseball stadium. Methodologically, the respondents participated to answering the questionnaires through convenient quota sampling. The total 3,000 questionnaires were sending to the respondents. However, the final proceeding shows 88 percent of the questionnaires. In order to analyse the consuming patterns of spectators, the study applied previous researches such as Wakefield and Sloan(1995). Hansen and Guthier(1989), Jeffrey(1997), Green(1995), Hong-Soul Kim(1999). They developed theories on measuring factors for consumer behaviors as the sports fans. Moreover, Hae-Jin Seo(2001) focused on the analysis of consumer behaviors related to sports fans. Therefore, this study is to adapt both disquisitions. The questionnaire for this study designed to an orderly and systematic manner to extract the required information in a sequential order from four main items to divide into fifteen specific factors based on varimax method. Also, three professional for in the area of sport management, four postgraduate students and two LG Twins baseball internet supporters were participated to analyse the content validity for questionnaire. Finally, four main factors was divided into fifteen subordinate factors. The data proceeding was used by two statistics packages of that SPSS/PC version 10.07 for Windows to test factor analysis, reliability analysis, multiple regression analysis. The level of significance of all hypothesis tests was α=0.5. This study reached the following conclusions. The results applied by gravity model predict the spectator demand indicated that the rate of cars possessed in each area and the spending time to stadium are significant variables to suggesting gravity model. That is, the rate of cars possessed is a positive factor, but the spending time to stadium is a restrictive factor. The suitability of gravity in this study shows through hypothesis test and graph. The prediction rate consisted of positive factors and restrictive factor is 77.7 percent. The formula of the predicting model for consuming patterns of professional baseball spectators by gravity model is the following figure. T = 122.578+1.259(car possessed)-2.817(spendi)