458 pages
INTRODUCTION
The core volumes of the Superstudy® of Sports Participation contain demographics, attitudinal and behavioral information on 103 individual sports and activities, but do not organize or integrate data by clusters of related activities or industry sectors.
This report allows interested professionals to rise above the dizzying array of individual sports statistics and see the big picture of a sports group or category. Very often, readers are focused on a single industry, and may prefer to view data pertinent to a certain sector, organized in different ways: ranked by participant population; by demographic indices; and most importantly, aggregated to reflect the total (net) number of participants within a sports group—after filtering out duplicate counts of cross-participants.
A board manufacturer for example, would like to know the size of his or her particular universe: the total number of frequent participants in Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Wakeboarding, Surfing and Boardsailing—after the elimination of cross-participants.
Board sports are in turn part of a larger category of so-called "Extreme" sports, a phenomenon of the Generation Y subculture. How large is the genre? Is it (as widely believed) a 12-24 year-old male market, or are there surprises? Are there geographic concentrations or wide dispersions of this "Millennial" segment—with coherent demographics, psychographics and sports participation behavior—that have implications for planning multi-sport theme parks or video game programming?
The realm of physical fitness offers a particularly compelling example of the need to aggregate data. The fitness movement is a complex tangle of sub-trends, each with a life of its own and each moving in a different direction. Running and Walking participation may be flat, Aerobics down, Treadmill Exercise up, and Personal Trainer usage way up; but in sum, what is the master trend of physical fitness? Market analysts in the more "traditional" sectors of Shooting Sports, Team Sports or Fishing have similar needs; they too must aggregate individual sports data.
This report is an exceptionally useful marketing tool for strategic planning because it presents the big picture—a wider vista ranging beyond the individual sport, and a new tableau upon which strategies for cross-marketing, line-extensions, related event sponsorship and other business opportunities can be written.
The universe of sports participation is divided into 16 sectors: Fitness, Team, Racquet, Skating, Indoor Games, Personal Contact Sports, Extreme Sports, Recreational Exercise, Bicycle Sports, Helmet Sports, Board Sports, Outdoors Activities, Shooting Sports, Fishing, Snow and Water Sports. Participation data on all individual sports within each group are ranked by total and frequent participants, according to size of sport population, and participation index.
Sports within each sector are then aggregated to reflect (net) data on gender, age, education, household income, geographic region, and market size. These data are provided for both total and frequent participants in each sports group. Analytically, frequent participants are surrogate buyers, who collectively, represent the product market.
The selection of individual sports that comprise each group is essentially intuitive, based on generally perceived commonalties that form clusters of related sports and activities. In any event, these groupings—while intuitively coherent in most cases—are subjective and arguable. Analysts may, by commissioning special data tabulations—tweak, add or delete activities from any existing group, or devise entirely new groupings.
In some instances, sports/activities appear in more than one grouping, and this is especially true for Extreme sports, the seemingly disparate collection of activities drawn from no fewer than six other sports groups, but cohere around a defining criterion—the "adrenaline rush" produced by the thrill and excitement of being "on the edge."
