Interconnection of Consumer Behaviour of Different Generations and Marketing Strategy of a Football Club – Experience in Slovakia

The basis of modern company management is the marketing concept, the customer-oriented management and strategic planning, the managerial decisions matching the market opportunities, challenges and the company objectives and opportunities. The marketing research is the input for corporate strategy, while on the other hand elaboration of the marketing strategy is based on the objectives of corporate strategy. The sports developments that started at the beginning of the 20th.century have been of high relevance, but still incomparable to the current measure of development. Generally, the countries of Western-Europe, due to their better economic performance, have achieved a higher level of development far earlier than the post-communist countries. The political and economic change of the 90s in the 20th century, later the EU enlargement opened a range of new economic opportunities also for our region. The sports marketing, similarly to marketing activity in other sectors and fields, has made relevant progress. The obsolete sports facilities were replaced by modern and well-equipped facilities. The customers were offered a wide variety of sports equipment and sports services. The objective of the research is to examine the services and products of a football club in the Slovak Premier League (Fortuna League) in terms of consumerism, as well as to summarize the consumer experience and opinion, emphasizing the marketing aspect. We formulated two hypotheses in this study. Chi-square test of independence was used for testing our hypotheses, by the help of which we examined several variables at the same time – and also the joint distribution of several variables. The results show a significant relationship between the age groups and the consumer habit of the customers at football matches. The outcome of the study also indicates that neither the age nor the distance from the sports event can influence the fans of the football club to attend the sporting event. Our results could be used by Slovak football clubs to make their marketing more precise and more efficient.