Women and Sport Consuming: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Pitts and Stotlar (2007) state that sports marketing is the process of designing and implementing activities of production, pricing, promotion and distribution of a sports product to meet the needs or desires of consumers and accomplish the company's objectives. For Azevêdo (2009), what was simply a growing adherence of practitioners and fans of some modalities - especially soccer - has become an economic power today. The need to implement new strategies to attract, satisfy and win the loyalty of consumers has become more necessary with the great development of the Sports Industry (Fagundes et al., 2012). As an area of academic research, the search for sports marketing has received more attention in national and international publications (Rocha & Bastos, 2011). In parallel with the growth of the Sports Industry and the need to serve consumers better and better, it is noted that women have had an increasing impact on the global sports economy (Harrison et al., 2016). However, a disparity in access and experiences in sports by women is still verified (Cunningham, 2015) and this is reflected in research, as much of the research regarding sports consumption does not have an analysis of the female audience, as corroborated by Delia (2014). In this sense, the objective of this article is to analyze the academic production that focuses on investigating sports consumption by women. This research is characterized as a Systematic Review according to the concept of Gomes & Caminha (2013). Initially, 250 articles were found and, paying attention to the established criteria, 7 articles were included in this review. We can conclude that the academic production that focuses on investigating the sports consumption by women is still scarce, it is recent, there is no globalization of research and search for specific female cores. We highlight the importance that entities should value women's sports since representation leads to greater consumption and, consequently, to greater financial gain. Understanding different contexts and populations can allow the comprehension of conditions related to consumer understanding, thus increasing generalizability.