Study On The Satisfaction Degree Of Contestants In Shanghai International Marathon From The Perspective Of Customer Participation

Under the planned economic system, the Chinese government managed the sports undertaking as a social welfare undertaking and conducted a unified arrangement of the sports undertaking through centralized resource distribution. With China’s adoption of the reform and opening up policy, Chinese sports industry has got an opportunity to develop rapidly. The economic and culture boom has changed the great masses’ concept of health. In the 21 st century, China has constantly reforming its social and economic system. Due to the far-reaching influence of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the enthusiasm of the great masses to participate in sports has reached an unprecedented high, thus leading to the emergence of many public sport events.As the market-oriented reform of China’s sports industry accelerates, there have been new requirements of the brand building, marketization degree, operation concept and service quality for various sport events. However, many aspects of the sport events are still in a preliminary stage. There lacks a complete service system to meet the requirement of the current market about the service quality requirement. At present, more and more professionals have realized the positive effect of sport events on social economy, livelihood and culture. Thus, the sport event service system construction has become more and more important. How to introduce the relatively mature professional concept to achieve a better and mature operation of sport events and how to ensure the steady and long-term development of sport event service, sport event quality and sport event brand have become an issue of great concern.The public marathon event often attracts thousands of people to participate in it. Now, governments of all levels and General Administration of Sport of China have attached great attention to the public marathon event. As a sector of the service industry, sport events should meet contestants’ requirements. This is also the responsibility of every sport event organizer. The major contestants can decide the make or mar of a sport event. With the intensification of the competition in the sport event market, contestants’ demands keep changing and evolving. The organizer is now faced with the problem about how to comprehensively learn contestants’ demands, how to provide better sport event services and how to increase the contestants’ satisfaction degree. This paper introduces the concept of customer participation. It discusses the influence of contestants’ participation behavior on the satisfaction degree of the sport event at an attempt to provide some suggestions for the organizer to provide better sport event services.Based on the data analysis, this paper comes to the following conclusions: First, contestants’ participation behavior during the marathon event has a significant influence on the improvement of contestants’ satisfaction degree of the sport event in terms of three dimensions, namely pre-event preparation, information exchange, interaction and cooperation. Among the three dimensions, the influence of interaction and cooperation on contestants’ satisfaction degree of the sport event is the most striking. Second, from the data analysis result, it can be seen that individual traits of contestants(including involvement, risk perception and internal and external control) have an obvious influence on the pre-event preparation, of which the influence of risk perception is the most striking. The three individual traits can also significantly influence information exchange, but the influence of involvement on it is the most striking, following the influence of internal and external control. Among the three individual traits, only risk perception has a significant influence on interaction and cooperation. Third, the difference of sex, residence, age and professional degree does not have a significant influence on contestants’ satisfaction degree. The difference of sex and professional degree cannot lead to a significant difference of contestants’ participation behavior. However, different residences can lead to different interaction and cooperation styles. Based on further analysis, it can be seen that the domestic non-Shanghainese contestants and the foreign contestants differ greatly from each other in terms of interaction and cooperation. Moreover, different ages can lead to a significant difference of pre-event preparation and information exchange. The analysis shows that the samples in two age groups, namely 23~34 and 35~60, differ greatly from each other in terms of pre-event preparation and information exchange.As an exploratory study, this paper is limited in terms of its conclusions and suggestions. More practices are required to prove the validity of its research findings.