Fan Experience in Spectator Sports and the Feeling of Social Connectedness

Hedonic consumption is often characterized by joint social experiences (Arnould and Price 1993; Holt 1995). Joint experiences involve sharing emotions with each other (Argo et al. 2008; Ramanathan and McGill 2007) and a certain feeling of belongingness may lead to increased hedonic value (Raghunathan and Corfman 2006). Customers of a hedonic mass service, e.g., spectator sports, may experience a variety of emotions during the course of consumption. These feelings vary from positive to negative, from strongly felt emotions to more subtle feelings, and have an impact on the value that a customer draws from the experience. However, to our knowledge the emotional state that arises because a customer feels connected to the collective of other customers has not been described yet. From the field of community research we know that people may feel relational bonds to others (McMillan 1996; McMillan and Chavis 1986). Such a feeling of connectedness may be viewed as the “emotional glue” between all customers in a spatially and timely limited frame. This emotion is qualitatively and semantically different from other feelings such as joy, fear, or anger and can be seen as a sign of homogeny of the group of customers. Despite the fact that customers differ strongly in psychometric and sociodemographic variables, they are all equal in the characteristic that they form a collective gathering. To a certain extent, a feeling of social connectedness may arise between consumers who do not even know each other.