Marketing Mix in Sport Tourism Context

The purpose of this study is to investigate the factors affecting sport tourism marketing mix. The research method was descriptive – correlation and the statistical sample consisted of 265 sport tourists attended at Azadi stadium in Tehran for watching a football game between Esteghlal and Persepolis that were selected through clustering technique. The research instrument was a questionnaire developed by Shonk (2006). The face and content validity was approved by sport management experts and the reliability was verified by Cronbach’s alpha (α=0/89). The SPSS16 was used for description of variables, and LISREL software was used for conducting Confirmatory Factor Analysis. The result showed that “product” had the most effect on sport tourism marketing mix. “Physical evidences” was the next important variable influencing sport tourism marketing mix. Moreover, “promotion”, “people”, “process”, “price”, and “place” had significant effects on sport tourism marketing mix. According to the results it can be concluded that according to sport tourists’ view point, “product” and “physical evidences” had more importance. Product includes quality of sport contests and its’ related components, and physical evidence refers to the quality of sport stadium and its’ related factors. Also, other variables such as promotion, people, process, price and place had significant effect on the sport tourism marketing mix that should be taken in granted in sport tourism management context.