1. Introduction
Customer satisfaction has long been an interest in marketing research, as it is believed to help organizations secure a loyal customer base [
1]. It has been suggested that higher customer satisfaction increases customer loyalty across a variety of service and product industries [
2]. In particular, dissatisfied customers may complain or leave to competitor brands, but increasing overall customer satisfaction may reduce complaints and increase customer loyalty. However, due to the increased competition among sport organizations and diversified consumption experiences of customers, high levels of purchase satisfaction may not be linked to actual repurchase behavior [
3]. More than 60 percent of customers who showed high satisfaction reported that they would switch to competitors that offer better customer value [
3]. As such, in a today’s highly competitive market environment, it is difficult for organizations to create a sustainable competitive advantage by simply providing customer satisfaction.
Recently, research on customers’ perceived value has provided sport organizations with effective marketing strategies to secure and maintain loyal customers [
4,
5]. For example, Jones, Byon, and Huang [
6] examined how service quality factors (i.e., interaction and physical environmental qualities) influenced utilitarian and hedonic values, which in turn affected customer engagement behavior in the context of Shanghai Formula One racing. Likewise, previous scholars reported several antecedents of customers’ perceived value, such as service quality [
4,
6,
7], team identification [
8], other customers’ behaviors [
9], and emotional consumption experiences [
10]. Furthermore, scholars found that perceived value embedded in service has a positive impact on improving customer satisfaction [
11], brand image [
7], and customer loyalty, which includes repurchase and word-of-mouth intention [
9].
Researchers have also suggested that brand globalness, which is defined as the levels of customers’ belief that a certain brand is available in the global markets [
12], can be a significant predictor of customers’ perceptions of brand value and behavioral intention. In particular, because customers’ interests in environmental and social issues are considered meaningful consumption value, consumers’ perceived brand globalness for a particular brand is reported to be associated with the customers’ positive perceptions of the brand’s social responsibility and the functional value that represents quality excellence [
13]. This is because with the advancement of communication technologies and the mitigation of trade barriers among countries, customers around the world can share similar consumption desires and tendencies [
14,
15]. However, previous studies have not examined how brand globalness influences customer loyalty mediated by customers’ perceived value in the context of spectator sport.
Golf spectatorship has seen a growth in profits [
16]. Particularly, the popularity of Korean professional golf spectatorship has continuously grown [
17]. For example, there are more than 500 golf courses, and golf is the most participated sport in South Korea [
17]. Although the Korean golf course industry has firmly established itself as an important part of the sport service industry, it is facing an increased domestic competition with other service industries. Therefore, Korean golf course organizations have made efforts to implement a global strategy. For example, the Sky72 Golf Course has held an annual golf tournament, the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) Korea Exchange Bank (KEB) Hana Bank Championship, since 2008 to achieve a brand positioning strategy and to enhance the global brand image. Consistent with the Korean golf industry’s trend, it is appropriate to shed light on customers’ perceived brand globalness in the context of Korean golf courses.
In sum, we investigated the relationships among customers’ perceived brand globalness, multidimensional perceived value including functional, emotional, social, and altruistic values, and customer loyalty in the context of the Korean golf course industry. The findings from the current study provide guidelines for golf course managers seeking a sustainable competitive advantage through brand globalness and brand value proposition.
3. Method
3.1. Research Setting
To understand how golf course brand globalness has an impact on customer loyalty through perceived values, professional golf tournaments were chosen as a research context. According to Sirak and Waraksa [
29], the Augusta National Golf Course in Georgia in the U.S., where the Masters Tournament is held, generated about
$115 million in revenue in 2015, which was more than a five-fold increase compared to
$22 million in 1997. Along with revenue generation from hosting an internationally well-known golf tournament, customers’ brand value perceptions of the golf course as a global brand through both domestic and international television broadcasting have had a great impact on creating a sustainable competitive advantage. The Augusta National Golf Course is considered to be one of the must-visit golf courses for many spectators around the world [
30].
In the current study, we chose LPGA tournaments as an appropriate research setting because the LPGA is an internationally well-known non-profit organization. Furthermore, the LPGA is recognized as having a global image and organizes women’s golf tournaments around the world, including the U.S., South Korea, and China. Thus, golf customers who visit the target golf courses in the present study would be more likely to develop a certain degree of the global brand image of the golf courses.
3.2. Participants and Data Collection Procedures
We collected data from spectators attending one of two LPGA golf tournaments in October 2018. To avoid sampling bias, five trained surveyors spread out on a golf course to collect data from spectators who had finished watching a golf tournament in numerous places, including the 18
th hole, parking lots, restaurants, cafes, and souvenir shops [
9]. As a screening question, we asked survey respondents to see if they had participated in this survey previously to eliminate any duplicate answers during the data collection. As a result, 200 survey questionnaires were collected, and two questionnaires were excluded because of incomplete responses, leaving 198 usable questionnaires. Male participants accounted for 69.2%, and the majority of participants were in their 40s and older (70.7%) and college graduates (83.3%). Of the respondents, 36.3% reported monthly incomes of below
$4999, and 36.3% stated that their frequency of annual golf attendance was two times.
Table 1 reports the summary of demographics.
3.3. Instruments
A total of 22 items measuring the focal constructs (i.e., brand globalness, perceived value, and customer loyalty) were included in the survey questionnaire. Also, socio-demographic information including gender, age, education level, occupation, monthly income, years of golf experience, and frequency of annual attendance was gathered. All items measuring the latent constructs were borrowed from the well-established existing scales. A 5-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree, was used for all items.
We adapted three items to measure brand globalness (α = 0.76) from Steenkamp et al. [
12]. Functional value (α = 0.85) was measured with three items [
10]. We used four modified items measuring emotional value (α = 0.89) from Sweeney and Soutar [
22]. Social value (α = 0.84) was measured with two items adapted from Kunkel, Doyle, and Berlin [
5]. Altruistic value (α = 0.75) was measured with three items adapted from Whang [
31]. We adapted two items assessing customer loyalty (α = 0.58) from Steenkamp et al. [
12].
As the survey items were initially developed in English from the previous studies, we adopted a back-translation method [
32]. A bilingual person translated the items into Korean, and then another bilingual individual back-translated them into English. Next, we evaluated whether the translated instruments were clear and accurate. No discrepancies were found.