Abstract
The research in this dissertation focuses on the building of customer loyalty and retention strategies in sports marketing with the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) as an example. This research aims to provide the factors which influence customer loyalty from a sports customer perspective. Furthermore, the research also aims to provide sports managers with reference when they are forming their retention strategies. Sports marketing are important for the economy of countries, for example, the USA, the UK, Spain, Netherlands and Japan. The actual global sports market size was estimated $235 billion in 2005. Sports marketing are a huge area including building of fans and customers. There are huge numbers of fans in the sports market, but they are seldom understood by the researchers. Hence, it is necessary for the marketers to understand what fans need so that the sport customers are satisfied, resulting in their loyalty and commitment. But there are few studies on this objective; most of the studies are on fans' consumer behaviour, fans' consumption motivation and fan identification. However, the former researchers paid little attention to construct loyalty and maintain loyalty.
