Unpacking the Women’s Sport Fan Experience: A Customer Journey Analysis

While the experiences of men’s sport consumers have been actively tracked and analyzed for decades, the uniqueness of women’s sport consumers and the women’s sport context have been largely ignored. The purpose of this research was to unpack the women’s sport fan journey and investigate fan interactions with multichannel touchpoints across three stages of the women’s sport fan journey including pre-event, event, and post-event experiences. A survey was developed based upon Lemon and Verhoef’s (2016) customer journey framework to evaluate fan touchpoints and assess related levels of satisfaction. Participants reported low satisfaction rates across all phases of the fan journey, with particular dissatisfaction identified within the event consumption phase. A combined 67.9% of participants highlighted the accessibility of women’s sports content as a key painpoint. Noted differences emerged between the experiences of fans based upon their age, suggesting a need to recalibrate traditional approaches to women’s sport fandom.