A COMPARISON OF SPORTS MARKETING AND SPORTS PSYCHOLOGY APPROACHES TO ACHIEVE GYM MEMBERS LOYALTY IN QATAR

Abstract

This thesis investigated the effects of two different pathways to achieve gym members loyalty. The first path is a marketing path that is built around the customer engagement concept, driven by perceived quality, satisfaction, involvement. The second path is adapted from the sports psychology field, which concentrates on exercise persistence and its antecedents: intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and outcome expectation. Member's loyalty was studied as an outcome of customer engagement and exercise persistence. The thesis also explored the moderating effects of gender and age generation. Data were collected in Qatar (n = 443) and analysed using SPSS and Smart PLS3. The results revealed that the two pathways explained a significant amount of variance in loyalty, but the marketing path had a higher explanatory power than the sports psychology path. The results showed that three predictors-perceived quality, satisfaction, and involvement-significantly influence customer engagement. Intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy had significant influence on exercise persistence, whereas outcome expectation was not a significant predictor. The findings show that customer engagement and involvement have significant effects independently of gender and generation (generation 1 vs. generation 2). Based on the results, key theoretical and managerial implications are proposed.