Experiential value of participation in angling competition – a study from Finland

Abstract

Competitive fishing is a global phenomenon covering thousands of fishing contests annually. We studied the experiential value of angling competitions from the participants’ point of view by using an online survey data among Finnish anglers who had been on an overnight angling competition trip within the last two years. The theory of consumption values is used as the basis for our theoretical framework, including functional, social, emotional, epistemic, and conditional value, while togetherness was suggested as the sixth value dimension. The value dimensions were measured with 45 variables. We used principal component and cluster analyses to identify three value-based clusters among respondents: Wellbeing seekers, Family-oriented competitors, and Novelty seekers. Novelty seekers were the youngest and least experienced group who are looking for novelty and they want to learn new things in competitive angling. Family-oriented competitors were the oldest and most experienced in competitive angling, and they valued friendship, family, and togetherness more than others. Wellbeing seekers were focused on self-development and positive effects on their wellbeing. Notably, proper and equal competition arrangements were the most important source of functional value. Surprisingly, the role of catching fish per se seems to be a minor contributor to the fishing competition experience value.

Bridging service dominant logic and the concept of customer value through higher order indexes: Insights from hospitality experiences

“…We first recognize that the regrouping of the eight values from the CCV into the three types of value according to O'Cass and Sok (2015) is the authors' criterion; we aim to seek greater bibliographic support for this in future works. Given the quality of current research on SDL with the profusion of works revising its scope and perspectives, both by its creators (e.g., Vargo and Lusch, 2017) and by others (e.g., Pohlmann and Kaartemo, 2017;Vinhas et al, 2017) we think the present work could invite future replicas, with other taxonomies of experiential values, like those of Schmitt (1999) or Mathwick et al (2001), to enrich the empirical literature on the experiential approach; but also integrating offline and online experiential knowledge (Bolton et al 2018;Jaziri, 2019), or adding epistemic and conditional values (Suni et al 2022). The validity of our results could also be enhanced by extending data collection into other geographies, assuming cultural differences may also affect in value creation processes (Gallarza et al, 2011), but a general overview of actors and interrelationship should remain constant, to support robustness of both models.…”

“…Customer experiences have been a continuously favoured area of study (Grönroos, 2020), always conceiving consumption as fully multidimensional (Chen et al, 2020;Suni et al, 2022) and therefore its study as multidisciplinary (Arnould, 2007;Bayraktaroğlu and Kozak, 2022). Nowadays, the contemporary challenges for customer experience researchers are the integration of offline and online experiential knowledge (Jaziri, 2019), and bringing together digital, physical, and social realms (Bolton et al, 2018).…”

“…For that reason, it is continually revisited, in many settings as hospitality or tourism (Kandampully et al, 2018;Walls et al, 2011). Indeed, empirically, it has been adopted in tourism literature for studying very diverse and varied settings: some of the latest being fishing competitions (e.g., Suni et al, 2022), pilgrimage (Chang et al, 2020) or wine tourism (Santos et al, 2019).…”

“…Managerially, the paper helps hotel managers by providing them with knowledge (models) and tools (indexes) for addressing and measuring the contribution to value creation of different resources (infrastructures, employees, and the consumers themselves as co-creators). Any tourism marketer is supposed to assure, especially after the sanitary crisis, value co-creation through context-based marketing, and assure the highest customization (Andersson, 2007, Gallarza andGil-Saura, 2020) through competitive combinations of values (Goldsmith and Tsiotsou, 2012;Suni et al, 2022;Bayraktaroğlu and Kozak, 2022). A more analytical understanding of both tourist experiences and value creation in terms of dimensions and actors is therefore necessary in the contemporary tourism industry.…”