The Developing a Structural Modeling of a Customer Loyalty in Sports Services Based on Relationship Marketing

Currently, customer loyalty is one of the keys to success and a basis for the profitability of the Sports Clubs. Hence, the purpose of this study was to develop structural modeling of customer loyalty in sports services based on relationship marketing by using structural equation modeling partial least square method.The population was included all both customers’ genders in fitness clubs of the Hamedan city (n=376), that were selected by random sampling. Measurement tools in the study for gathering data were the relationship marketing questionnaire (Abasi, 2002) and customer loyalty questionnaire (Huang, 1998), and the validity and reliability were approved. SmartPls v.3 and IBM SPSS Softwares were used to analyze the structural equation modeling and partial least square method. The results revealed that relationship marketing had a significant effect on customer loyalty that it is equal to β=0.391. An examination of the effect of relationship marketing components on customer loyalty showed that only the quality-of-service component had a significant effect on customer loyalty (β=0.303). In conclusion, paying attention to the total relationship marketing components is a strategy to influence customer loyalty in Sports Clubs. Consequently, there is a need for club managers and owners to pay particular attention to the basic elements of relational marketing in order to retain a stable and long-term relationship with their customers.