The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

https://www.emerald.com/insight/1464-6668.htm

Understanding retail quality of Sport retail

quality
sporting goods stores: a text
mining approach
Luke Lunhua Mao
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Received 6 March 2020
Revised 28 April 2020
Abstract 20 May 2020
Accepted 20 May 2020
Purpose – Sporting goods retailing is a significant sector within the sport industry with the total revenue of
this sector reaching $52.2 billion in 2018. Beset with formidable competition, sporting goods stores are
compelled to augment their merchandise with service and improve retail quality. The purpose of this study is to
investigate retail quality of sporting goods stores (RQSGS).
Design/methodology/approach – Based on 27,793 online reviews of 1481 stores in the United States, this
study used Leximancer 4.0, a text mining software, to identify critical retail quality dimensions associated with
sporting goods stores, and further explored the most salient dimensions among different levels of ratings.
Findings – Customer service and store aspects are the two higher-order dimensions of RQSGS; holistic
experience, manager and staff are three themes under customer service, and product, B&M store and online–
offline integration are three themes under store aspects. Furthermore, extreme reviews focus more on customer
service, whereas lukewarm reviews focus more on store aspects.
Practical implications – Knowledgeable staff, managers and online–offline integration are instrumental in
creating superior retail quality. Sporting goods stores should enhance hedonic and social values for consumers
in order to ward off online competitions.
Originality/value – This study explored retail quality dimensions that are pertinent to sporting goods
retailing utilizing text mining methods. This study to certain extent cross-validated the existing retailing
literature that is developed on alternative methods.
Keywords Retail quality, Sporting goods stores, e-Commerce, Leximancer, Text mining
Paper type Research paper

Introduction
Sporting goods stores, coded as 451110 and defined as “business establishments primarily
engaging in retailing new sporting goods” by the North American Industry Classification
System (NAICS), is an important sector within the sport industry (U.S. Census, 2019;
Eschenfelder and Li, 2007). Major players in this sector include Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc.,
Foot Locker, Academy Sports and Outdoors and Bass Pro Shops Inc. They retail bicycles,
camping equipment, exercise equipment, athletic apparel, athletic footwear, sporting guns
and the like. There were 40,122 sporting goods stores in the United States and the total
revenue of this sector reached $52.2 billion in 2018 (Hyland, 2018). Roughly speaking, this
industrial sector is composed of three categories of stores: a) sporting goods superstores, such
as Dick’s Sporting Goods and Academy Sports and Outdoors, which typically have a retailing
space of over 35,000 square feet and emphasize high volume sales; b) traditional sporting
goods stores, such as Big 5 Sporting Goods, which range in size from 5,000 to 20,000 square
feet and typically carry a varied assortment of merchandise; and c) specialty stores, which
typically carry a wide assortment of one specific product category, such as shoes, golf or
outdoor equipment. Examples include Golf Galaxy, Finish Line and lululemon athletica.
Primarily driven by the increased sports participation, health-conscious consumers and a
strong rise in demand for athletic footwear from consumers aged 10 to 19, sporting goods
retailing was projected to have an annual growth rate of 1.9% for the following five years
International Journal of Sports
Marketing and Sponsorship
This project was supported by the College of Education at the University of New Mexico. The views © Emerald Publishing Limited
1464-6668
expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funders. DOI 10.1108/IJSMS-03-2020-0029
IJSMS (Hyland, 2018). However, sporting goods retailing is highly competitive (Dick’s Sporting
Goods, 2018; Gale, 2018). Sporting goods stores compete not only with adjacent stores in their
own industry but also with online retailers (e.g. Amazon), mass merchandisers (e.g. Costco,
Walmart), department stores (e.g. Kohl’s), direct channels of sports brands (e.g. Callaway,
Nike), along with others (Gale, 2018). In fact, Walmart, with $9.8 billion revenue from sporting
goods sales, was the biggest retailer in the market in 2015 (Statista, 2018). The most recent US
Census Bureau Consumer Spending Report suggested that sporting goods, hobby, musical
instrument and book stores is the only category that has not seen a positive month-over-
month increase in 2018, and the total sales decreased by 3.4% in the first 10 months of 2019
(U.S. Census, 2018). Based on the business statuses listed on yelp.com, about 15–22% of
sporting goods stores might have been closed in the past five years.
Sporting goods retailing is highly competitive and moderately concentrated (Gale, 2018;
Hyland, 2018). The IBISWorld report suggests that the four major players of the industry,
including Bass Pro, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Academy Sports and Outdoors and Recreational
Equipment have a total market share of 48.7%. About 93% of sporting goods stores employ
fewer than 20 people and cater to specialty niches and local consumers. As a result, most stores
still rely on the revenues from their brick and mortar (B&M) stores even in the era of rapid
growth of e-commerce and multichannel retailing (Chiu et al., 2011). For instance, 87.6% of sales
in 2017 at Dick’s Sporting Goods and 78.3% of Cabela’s sales in 2016 occurred in their offline
channels (Cabela’s, 2016; Dick’s Sporting Goods, 2018). It is reasonable to assume that the
proportion of offline sales for independent local stores and smaller chain stores will be greater.
To effectively compete in the sporting goods market, retailers have extensively
augmented their products with additional services. In addition to such services as
installation, warranty, credit cards, return and exchange, sporting goods retailers may
utilize other more idiosyncratic tools (Homburg et al., 2002). For instance, specialty running
shoe stores may augment their products with gait analyses; tennis pro-shop with stringing
services; bike shops with repair services; yoga equipment with training classes; and general
stores with loyalty programs. The demarcation between products and services has been
blurred. Service quality matters to sporting goods stores as much as to any pure service firms,
because it not only elicits positive behavioral consequences and engenders consumer loyalty
(Zeithaml et al., 1996) but also enhances retailing differentiation (Davis-Sramek et al., 2009;
Homburg et al., 2002; Jiang and Zhang, 2011).
Retail quality is considered more complex than quality of pure service as retail stores sell
products, together with services implicitly or explicitly (Dabholkar et al., 1996). Furthermore,
it is generally found that retail quality dimensions are often contextualized: quality
dimensions and perceived importance of these dimensions tend to vary across different
industries and different types of stores (Mehta et al., 2000). The quality dimensions associated
with high fashion retailing (Gagliano and Hathcote, 1994) likely differ from those with
grocery retailing (Martinelli and Balboni, 2012); the quality dimensions of an online store
(Yang et al., 2003) likely differ from those of a conventional B&M store (Dabholkar et al., 1996);
the quality dimensions of service-intensive stores likely differ from those of goods-intensive
stores (Mehta et al., 2000). From this reasoning, although we suspect sporting goods stores
may have some unique characteristics, we do not have a prior information or belief about how
they may differ.
Situating in the wider context of retailing quality (Dabholkar et al., 1996; Simmers and
Keith, 2015), the purpose of this study is therefore to empirically examine the quality
dimensions of sporting goods retailing. Similar to the conventional content analysis approach
(Simmers and Keith, 2015; Yang and Fang, 2004), this study draws insights about retail
quality based on consumer self-generated online reviews, specifically a unique real-world
dataset released by Yelp on August 1, 2018 for their round 12 dataset challenge competition.
Our specific research questions include: What are the retail quality dimensions as reflected by Sport retail
online reviews? How do reviews differ by ratings? quality
Yelp is a publicly traded company publishing crowd-sourced reviews for local businesses
through yelp.com and their yelp mobile app. By the end of 2017, Yelp has 148 million reviews
on their platform. Yelp is one of few online review companies that have built sophisticated
machine learning models to filter fake reviews (Kamerer, 2014) and their filtration system has
been found reasonably effective by third-party researchers from University of Illinois at
Chicago and Google (Mukherjee et al., 2013). Additionally, it is ruled by the California
Supreme Court that businesses cannot force Yelp to remove a review (Thanawala, 2018), thus
reviews from dissatisfied consumers are kept intact. It can be argued that the reviews have
provided a more comprehensive overview of a business. Therefore, this dataset has enough
credibility to provide insights about sporting goods business.
This research makes several contributions. First, to our best knowledge, this research is
the first attempt to examine retail quality of sporting goods stores. Although service quality
is a prominent research area in sport management, the existing literature has primarily
focused on spectator sports and fitness clubs. Sporting goods retailing sector, as a major
sector of sports industry, warrants an examination. This study provides an early description
of retail quality in the context of sporting goods retailing. Second, this study to certain extent
cross-validates the existing retailing literature that is developed on alternative methods.
Third, this research extends service quality literature by considering the interaction between
online–offline channels as the online channels significantly shape consumers’ perceptions of
offline service encounters. By doing so, this research updates the theory of retail service
quality. Fourth, this research utilizes the text mining methodology and a large data set of self-
generated online reviews. Specifically, a probabilistic topic modeling method, as implemented
by Leximancer 4.0, is used to uncover the underlying structure of the reviews, which provides
a more objective calibration to the existing literature. Finally, our substantive results help
owners of sporting goods stores understand the important dimensions within sports
retailing.

Relevant literature
Service quality
Service quality is one of the most researched topics and the literature is rich. The focus of this
line of research has been primarily on the definition of quality pertaining to services in
comparison with quality of physical goods. As service is thought intangible, inseparable,
heterogeneous and perishable, it cannot be easily seen, felt or touched; thus the experience of
it is elusive and evaluation of it subjective (Kotler and Keller, 2006; Parasuraman et al., 1985).
As a result, the prevailing paradigms of service quality acknowledge that service quality is an
overall judgment about service superiority. Service quality essentially is perceived quality
(Oliver, 1980).
Most leading service quality scholars agree that service quality as a perception stems from
some types of comparisons (Gr€onroos, 1984; Parasuraman et al., 1985; Zeithaml et al., 1990).
The prevailing SERVQUAL paradigm, as developed by Parasuraman et al. (1985), follows
Oliver (1980) disconfirmation paradigm and contends service quality is a comparison
between what consumers feel the service providers should offer (i.e. customer expectations)
and their perceptions of how the service deliverer performs (Parasuraman et al., 1985). The
initial version of SERVQUAL includes 10 dimensions: reliability, responsiveness,
competence, access, courtesy, communication, credibility, security, understanding/knowing
the customer and tangible (Parasuraman et al., 1985). In comparison, the revised version of
SERVQUAL includes five dimensions of service quality. They are tangibles, reliability,
IJSMS responsiveness, assurance and empathy (Parasuraman et al., 1988). These dimensions are
generic in nature and are suggested to be applicable to a wide variety of services.
Alternative measures of service quality exist, and they depart from the SERVQUAL either
on the target to be compared or if a comparison is needed. For instance, Teas (1993) considers
service quality as a comparison between perception and ideals; the SERVPERF paradigm
developed by Cronin and Taylor (1992, 1994) contends that service quality is based on
perceptions alone. Furthermore, in sport management literature, Chelladurai and Chang
(2000) proposed a comprehensive evaluation model. They consider multiple standards and
contend that the standard to be used depends on the type of service being evaluated.
Inspired by the SERVQUAL and other service quality paradigms, service quality remains
a prominent research area of sport management since 1990s. In addition to Chelladurai and
Chang (2000) conceptual model, most empirical studies have focused on recreational sports
centers (Kim and Kim, 1995; Ko and Pastore, 2005; Lam et al., 2005), fitness centers (Foroughi
et al., 2019; Papadimitriou and Karteroliotis, 2000), spectator sports (McDonald et al., 1995;
Yoshida, 2017) and sport educational program (Mao and Zhang, 2012). Sancihak and Seuna-
Chana (2013) examined the impact of sponsorship on perceived service quality of sporting
goods stores and they directly applied Dabholkar et al. (1996) scale in measuring sporting
goods retailing quality. Their focus was to examine the impact of sponsorship rather than to
examine the service quality. To our knowledge, no study has focused on sporting goods
stores.

Retail quality
Because retail stores sell products, together with services implicitly or explicitly, the retail
service quality is more complex. Consumers experience, which is the origin of their quality
perception, is determined not only by in-store experiences but also experiences related to the
products. Therefore, as reviewed by Dabholkar et al. (1996) and many others, earlier studies
on retail service quality by directly applying SERVQUAL found that the five dimensions of
SERVQUAL were inadequate to capture the full gamut of quality in retailing. With an
understanding of the gap in the literature, Dabholkar et al. (1996) developed a retail service
quality scale, which would later be cited as RSQS by other researchers.
The RSQS can be considered as a modification and extension to the SERVQUAL.
Dabholkar et al. (1996) did not attempt to conceptually differentiate retail service quality from
the generic service quality. Nor were they bothered by if retailing is a service or more than a
service. Rather, efforts were made to incorporate the fact that retailers sell both products and
services; and identify additional dimensions of service quality that are unique to retailing.
The seminal hierarchical structure of retail quality identified by Dabholkar et al. (1996)
includes five dimensions: physical aspects, reliability, personal interaction, problem solving
and policy. The physical aspects in turn have two subdimensions: appearance and
convenience, encompassing items relating to appearance of the facility, store layouts,
convenience of shopping, etc. The reliability dimension resembles the reliability dimension in
the SERVQUAL; but the RSQS breaks reliability down to “keeping promises” and “doing it
right” and considers merchandise availability as a component of “doing it right”. The
personal interaction dimension also has two subdimensions: inspiring confidence and
courteous/helpful. As explained by Dabholkar et al. (1996), this dimension subsumes the
assurance and responsiveness dimensions of the SERVQUAL. Both problem solving and
policy do not have subdimensions. Problem solving is specifically reserved for handling of
returns, exchanges and complaints, which is common in retailing. Policy refers to the service
quality influenced by store policies. The policy dimension in the seminal article is a curious
one as it does not include return policy, warranty policy or other store policies. Instead, this
dimension includes merchandise quality, parking availability and so on.
 In summary, in comparison with the pure SERVQUAL services, the peculiarities Sport retail
associated with retailing as identified by the RSQS include: a) store layouts, convenience of quality
shopping, easiness of finding merchandise (physical aspects); b) merchandise availability
(reliability); c) handling of returns, exchanges and complaints (problem solving); and d)
merchandise quality, operating hours, parking, credit cards service (policy).
Both the SERVQUAL and the RSQS have inspired much applied research in retailing.
Most subsequent investigations of service quality in retailing (Siu and Cheung, 2001), online
retailing (Trocchia and Janda, 2003) or a subsector of retailing, such as apparel specialty
stores (Gagliano and Hathcote, 1994) and grocery stores (Jain and Aggarwal, 2018; Siu and
Chow, 2004) would utilize the SERVQUAL /RSQS or a modified variant of SERVQUAL/
RSQS. Mehta et al. (2000) differentiated two types of retailing, service-intensive retailing and
goods-intensive retailing, and found that SERVQUAL worked better for the former and
RSQS excelled for the later.
With the phenomenal growth of e-commerce and online shopping, many recent studies in
the retailing literature have focused on Internet retail (Janda, 2002; Nguyen et al., 2018;
Trocchia and Janda, 2003; Yang and Fang, 2004; Yang et al., 2003) or aspects of service quality
that are pertinent to online retailing, such as logistics and online order fulfillment (Murfield
et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2019). In the same fashion as RSQS’s extension of SERVQUAL to
accommodate characteristics of retailing, these later studies expanded the literature by
incorporating additional dimensions associated with information systems, which is a critical
component of online retailing.
Another salient development in this literature is to examine the retail quality from the
perspective of multi-channel retailing as many retails nowadays have both online and offline
channels (Lin, 2012). For instance, Acquila-Natale and Iglesias-Pradas (2020) developed a
comprehensive multi-channel retailing quality scale by integrating quality dimensions that
are pertinent to both physical stores and online shopping. They identified in-store experience,
reliability and fulfillment, service provision policies and customer service are the four
retailing quality dimensions.

Content analysis, text mining and leximancer

To uncover retailing quality dimensions, content analysis approach has been utilized by
some researchers (Aggarwal et al., 2009; Simmers and Keith, 2015; Yang and Fang, 2004;
Yang et al., 2004; Yang et al., 2003). For instance, Yang and his colleagues have conducted a
series of content analytical studies on online retailing. Based on a total of 1078 online
reviews, with an average length of 65 words, of nine online companies, Yang et al. (2003)
explored service quality dimensions associated with online retailing. They classified these
reviews into positive and negative reviews and compared quality attributes across these
reviews. Yang et al. (2004) subsequently developed an online retailing quality scale based
on statements extracted from 848 reviews of online banking services. Of particular
relevance to the current study is Simmers and Keith (2015). They utilized consumer
comments cards to gain insights of retailing quality. Comments cards are used by many
retailing stores to assess service quality in the United States. Based on a content analysis of
a sample of sixty comment cards collected from diverse retail stores throughout the United
States, Simmers and Keith (2015) compared the dimensions derived from comment cards
and the RSQS dimensions. They found that two RSQS subdimensions – convenience (under
physical aspects) and promises (under reliability) – were not present in comment cards.
Additionally, they identified several new themes that were not included in the RSQS. Their
new additions include friendliness and professionalism, check-out, delivery, loading,
availability of service, price, selection, value, condition, usability, styling, preference and
the location of store facilities. Comparing with the RSQS, Simmers and Keith (2015) had a
IJSMS broader operationalization of retail quality. More store policies, including refund/exchange,
delivery, were also considered.
Complementary to traditional content analysis approach, one salient advancement in
marketing research methodology is the use of text mining. Text mining is a process of
deriving meaningful information from a large number of unstructured texts using Natural
Language Processing (NLP) technology and has been widely used for information
extraction and retrieval, clustering and classification and trend detection (Berezina et al.,
2016; Yu et al., 2011a). The text mining approach enables researchers to extract structured
information from large datasets with objectivity (Duan et al., 2013), and capture semantical
nuances that might be difficult to be differentiated by manual coding (Roberts et al., 2014). It
has been suggested that text mining is epistemologically compatible with grounded theory
and content analysis; it is similar to content analysis in the sense that both aim to extract
common themes by counting words (Yu et al., 2011b). There are numerous applications of
text mining technology in marketing research. For instance, Aggarwal et al. (2009)
suggested that text mining technology can be used by retailors to monitor the positioning of
their brands against their major competitors; Netzer et al. (2012) proposed an innovative
method to research market structure using text mining; Humphreys and Wang (2018) and
Berger et al. (2019) proposed two methodological guidelines of conducting text mining for
consumer behavior and marketing scholars; Berezina et al. (2016) used text mining to
understand service attributes associated with hotel industry; Chakrabarti et al. (2018)
proposed a text mining approach to capture service quality of private banks in India. They
found that sentimental scores of consumer reviews significantly correlated with service
quality dimensions.
There are various open source programming packages and commercial software available
to conduct text mining, such as gensim and Scikit-learn packages in Python, mallet in JAVA,
tidytext in R, SPSS Modeler Text Analytics, SAS Text Miner, and Leximancer. Particularly,
Leximancer has been extensively used in social science and business research, including
sport management research. For instance, Shilbury (2012) and Anagnostopoulos and Bason
(2015) used Leximancer to analyze the topics and contents of sport management–related
journals; Tseng et al. (2015) used Leximancer to understand destination image based on
travel blogs.
Roughly speaking, there are three types of text mining: unsupervised learning, where
learning algorithm only draws inferences from input data without labeled responses
(analogous to factor analysis which does not have a dependent variable); semi-supervised
learning, where learning algorithm draws inferences from a small amount of labeled data
with a large amount of unlabeled data; and supervised learning, where learning algorithm
draws inferences from data with labeled responses (analogous to regression analysis which
has at least one dependent variable) (Ang et al., 2016). Whereas most existing studies have
only utilized the unsupervised learning algorithm in Leximancer, Leximancer is able to
implement some supervised learning algorithm through “learning from tags”. One
advantage of supervised text mining over unsupervised text mining is that it can
incorporate information from the labels assigned to the texts. The “learning from tags”
function in Leximancer conceptually is similar to Labeled Latent Dirichlet Allocation
(Ramage et al., 2009) and supervised topic modeling (Mcauliffe and Blei, 2008). As far as we
know, Leximancer is one of very few programs that have implemented this function.
Utilizing Leximancer as a text mining tool, the current study attempts to identify key retail
quality dimensions of sporting goods stores as reflected by yelp reviews. Furthermore,
drawing upon the “learning from tags” function, this study also explores the relationships
among these identified quality dimensions with consumers’ summative judgment (i.e. the
star ratings).
Methods Sport retail
Yelp review data quality
This study utilizes the Yelp reviews to understand the service quality dimensions pertaining
to sporting goods retailing under the modern marketing milieu. The Yelp dataset, released by
yelp.com in August 2018, includes five json files, 7.3 Gigabyte in total, containing information
about businesses, reviews, users, check-ins and tips respectively. Of relevance to this study
are the businesses and reviews files. The businesses file is used to filter out the relevant
sporting goods stores based on the business category (i.e. primary business activities). Yelp
has over 1200 categories of businesses, which were extracted based on consumers search.
Whereas Yelp allows a maximum of three categories to be listed for any business, all
businesses included in this study contain “sporting goods” in their category list. We identified
1481 sporting goods stores, including both full-line general stores and specialty stores. These
stores operate or have operated in 320 zip-codes in 7 states, namely Arizona, Illinois, North
Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
After the identification of the stores, their respective reviews can be identified by linking
the businesses file to the reviews file through unique business_id variable in the dataset.
Subsequently, 27,793 reviews with a total of 3,080,054 words were identified. The dates of the
reviews spanned from April 29, 2005 to July 2, 2018. The length of reviews ranged from 1 to
978 words, with a mean length of 111 words and standard deviation of 100 words. In addition
to the text, the star rating of each review is also recorded. Table 1 further presents the word
counts of reviews grouped by star ratings.
Yelp did not report the demographic information of the reviewers, but they were a part of
the users. Comparing with the general US population, yelp users on average are younger,
wealthier and better educated. Plausibly, the demographics of yelp users are what most
sporting goods stores target at. In the United States, 33% of yelp users are 18–34 years old;
35% are 35–54 years old, and 32% are 55þ years old. Regarding educational level, 64% of
yelp users have some college education, 18% have grad school education and 18% are below
college education. Regarding income, 51% of yelp users have an income of greater than 100
thousand USD, 24% users have an income between 60 and 99 thousand USD and 25% have
an income below 59 thousand USD (Bennett et al., 2003).

Leximancer analysis
The current study used Leximancer 4.0, a commercial software implementing a patented
probabilistic topic modeling algorithm largely based on Naı€ve Bayes classifier with
improvements for seeded classifier approach (Salton, 1989; Smith, 2003). The 27,793 reviews
are subsequently analyzed by Leximancer 4.0. Leximancer identifies themes in a text based
on the occurrences and co-occurrences of words or text segments. Roughly speaking, an
analysis using Leximancer entails the following stages: text preprocessing, automatic
concept seed identification, concept seeds editing, thesaurus identification, compound
concept editing and concept map and report generation (Nunez-Mir et al., 2016).

Star ratings N Percentage Mean SD Min Median Max

One 4,016 14.45 150 137 6 108 978

Two 1,517 5.46 149 120 9 118 905 Table 1.
Three 1,712 6.16 131 106 3 103 943 Descriptive statistics of
Four 4,448 16.00 118 94 2 94 957 review length by star
Five 16,100 57.93 93 81 1 70 934 ratings
IJSMS Preprocessing. Preprocessing text file is critical to any Natural Language Processing
algorithms. One advantage of Leximancer is that the software can almost automate the
critical data preprocessing step with minimal researchers’ input. Therefore, the
unpreprocessed reviews were supplied to Leximancer.
Concept Editing. In Leximancer, there are three key terms: theme, concept and thesaurus.
Themes are clusters of concepts that are selected based on co-occurrences; concepts in turn
are defined by a thesaurus of words. Leximancer firstly generates concepts and themes
before it identifies the relevant thesaurus of words. After preprocessing, Leximancer can
quickly identify the concepts and themes in an exploratory fashion based on frequency and
co-occurrences of words. Automatic concept seeds are generated based on a ranked list of
these words. If desirable, conceptual seeds can also be manually edited by researchers. For
instance, as reviewers often mention about store names in the reviews, we combine all the
names into one concept and label it as “storeName”; this also applies to city names (cityName),
brand names (brandName), staff names (staffName). The reviewers may also mention about a
specific product in the reviews, which may not be of central interest to our research. We may
merge all these different product names using one concept “product”. In this study, we used
camel case words (e.g. storeName) to indicate user-defined seeds.
Compound Concepts. Although Leximancer can automatically extract some multiple-
words proper names and treat them as one concept, the software relies on the capitalization of
the words as a hint of proper names (Leximancer, 2011). Some compound concepts, such as
“customer service”, were not able to be automatically identified. After the generation of
thesaurus of words, researchers can manually add compound concepts. For this study, we
added one compound concept “customer service”.
Mapping Concepts. Finally, Leximancer can select concepts and tags to map in the final
report generation stage. Tags are special names assigned to a folder, a file, a variable,
patterns, non-meaningful texts. By default, words associated with tags will be excluded from
the machine learning process, unless the program is instructed to “learn from tags”. In this
study, we instructed the program to learn the star rating tags. Furthermore, to be explained in
the discussion section, we assigned “gun(s)”, “bike(s)”, and “bicycle(s)” as killed concepts. The
final output of Leximancer provides an interactive conceptual map that visually represents
the main themes and concepts extracted from the text mining process and contains
information about how they are associated.

Results
Validity of extracted information
An analysis of the 27,793 reviews about 1481 stores that sell sporting goods produced a
concept map consisting of a maximum of 81 concepts. Before we present the substantive
themes and concepts, we attempt to assess the face validity of the extracted information. Text
mining is a relatively new method to academic research; as a result, the standards for
assessing its validity have not yet fully established. Following the validity types proposed by
Krippendorff (2004), Dr. Andrew Smith, the inventor of Leximancer, assessed face validity,
stability, reproducibility, correlative validity and functional validity of Leximancer and
found the tool reliable and valid (Smith and Humphreys, 2006).
Humphreys and Wang (2018) suggested that three strategies – comparison, correlation
and prediction – may be used to assess various types of validity, which would require the
document-term matrix or collecting additional external non-textual variables. As a
proprietary software, Leximancer does not disclose the exact formula and algorithms used
for the analyses; neither does it provide the conventional document-term matrix as far as we
know. Therefore, the ability of conducting further analysis is restricted due to the lack of
document-term matrix, and we can only conduct some descriptive statistics based on the
available output. In the spirit of Humphreys and Wang (2018) correlation strategy, we Sport retail
examined the correspondence of the extracted sentimental words and star ratings to assess quality
how well the extracted concepts have preserved information in the raw reviews. It is intuitive
to hypothesize that reviews with higher ratings will contain more positive sentimental words
than those with lower ratings. The results of our analysis, as shown in Table 2, suggest that
higher ratings are indeed accompanied by more positive sentimental words and fewer
negative sentimental words. This pattern is largely consistent across all the sentimental
words identified Leximancer, which lends credibility to the information extracted by the text
mining approach.

Emergent themes and concepts

Figure 1 presents the concept map with theme size at 50% and visible concepts at 100%,
which serves as the foundation for further analysis. The Leximancer concept map is
interactive in nature: different clusters of concepts (i.e. themes) can be generated by adjusting
the “% Theme Size” sliding bar. With theme size at 100%, only one theme, “customer” is
produced; with theme size at 0%, each individual concept becomes a theme. Furthermore,
although some of the identified concepts were deemed to be generic and less diagnostic (e.g.
“feel”, “nice”, “area”), there is nothing to lose by keeping them for potential exploration. Hence,
we decided to keep “% Visible Concepts” at 100%.
Five themes, “customer”, “staff”, “prices”, “store” and “return”, with a connectivity rate of
100%, 90%, 71%, 59% and 34% respectively, were identified as dominant by Leximancer.
Connectivity, indicating the relative importance of the themes, is calculated based on the co-
occurrence counts of the concept with every other concept on the map (Leximancer, 2011).
Customer. The strongest theme, “customer”, is the most important theme. Out of the
12,962 counts of “customer”, 11,021 are paired with “service”, making it a compound theme,
“customer service”. This theme, including concepts like “experience”, “care”, “business”,
“review”, “purchased”, “owner”, “time”, “local”, “life”, relates to the holistic judgment of
service experience and customer care.
Here are some quotations of this theme:
. . . The customer service is ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE in all of my experiences. Today i went in to
buy some balls and 5 of them were just sitting around not doing anything. . .

Concept One-star Two-star Three-star Four-star Five-star

FAVORABLE 0.65 1.06 1.58 2.03 2.38

nice 0.08 0.18 0.26 0.27 0.21
love 0.04 0.09 0.12 0.21 0.23
amazing 0.02 0.01 0.05 0.05 0.15
cool 0.03 0.05 0.09 0.12 0.09
fun 0.02 0.02 0.07 0.1 0.1
UNFAVORABLE 1.07 0.87 0.57 0.35 0.31
bad 0.14 0.15 0.12 0.09 0.06
Note(s): FAVORABLE, UNFAVORABLE are not words used in the reviews. Instead, they are collections of
sentimental words automatically detected by Leximancer. Words in lower cases are the exact words used in the
reviews. As reviews of different star ratings on average have different lengths, the frequency was scaled by
length of the review using 150, the average length of one-star review, as the baseline. The scaling coefficients Table 2.
for two-star, three-star, four-star and five-star reviews were 150/149, 150/131, 150/118, and 150/93 (see Table 1). Occurrence frequencies
The numbers in the table mean that given the level of star rating, how likely these sentimental words would of sentimental words
occur in the review text by star ratings
IJSMS . . . He had no intention to service me, he did not care if I left unpleased, there was no sense of urgency
in the atmosphere to leave any customer with a lasting impression. A good lasting impression at that.
Customer service once meant meeting the needs of the customer by any means, especially when
you’re more than capable of doing so. . .
Staff. The second strongest theme, “staff” (merged with “employee(s)”) has a word count of
14,442, which corresponds to the Sales Staff dimension by Simmers and Keith (2015). The
most important concepts under this theme are “helpful”, “friendly” and “knowledgeable”; and
the theme connects to “needed” (merged with “need(s)”), “recommend”, and “staffName”. This
following quote highlights the quality of sales staff expected by consumers and positive
behavioral consequences associated with high quality of sales staff:
. . . We were at [storeName] the day before and left empty handed because the girl who worked in the
snowboarding dept. had no idea what she was talking about. [Another storeName] was the exact
opposite. A very helpful and informative guy by the name of [staffName] answered all of our
questions. He gave us his personal advice over what size board would be right for me . . . After
speaking with him I felt confident in the purchase I was making, and so happy that I ended by a new

Figure 1.
Leximancer conceptual
map with Visual
Concepts at 100% and
Theme Size at 50%.
The Leximancer
output is interactive as
the users can decide the
number of concepts
and the number of
themes to be displayed
by adjusting the
sliding bars (% Visible
Concepts and %
Theme Size,
respectively) below the
conceptual map. The
themes are displayed in
a conventional heat
map scheme, with the
most important theme
displaying in red,
followed by orange,
green and so on; the
size of the circles has no
bearing as to its
importance in the text
(Leximancer, 2011).
The words in red
starting with “stars_”
are the ratings of the
businesses and were
treated as “tags” by
Leximancer. The
concepts that cluster
near a tag indicate that The black line in the middle, which is not a Leximancer output, is manually added by the
they are more specific researcher. Additionally, the researcher also added the names of themes to the original
to the tag
Leximancer output
 pair of pants that I did not really even need. I am just sooooooo impressed by . . . the great customer Sport retail
service that was provided.
quality
Price. The third strongest theme, “price”, with a word count of 9170, is really one
subdimension of “product” which has a word count of 7106. This theme also aligns well with
the product dimension identified by Simmers and Keith (2015). Apparently, “price” is the
most important concept under this theme. Other highly connected concepts are “selection”,
“quality”, “inventory” / “stores” (as a verb, merging with “storing”). Here are a few review
excerpts that highlight the product dimension:
. . . Stopped by today just to check out the store, and I walked out with a new backpacking tent. Prices
are very reasonable. . .Not a huge selection, but they definitely have quality products.
“. . .This place has all the snow and skateboard gear one might need. Great priced helmets for skating
and skiing, great penny board selection.” “The [brandName], [brandName], [brandName] and
[brandName] shoe selection is insane. Seriously, blows [competitorStore] out of the water. . . kids and
adult sizes! And [brandName] are hard to find. . . my husband loves them . . .
Store. The fourth theme, “store”, with a word count of 12,851, includes the store facilities
dimension by Simmers and Keith (2015) and also overlaps with the service dimension by
Simmers and Keith (2015) and policy dimension by Dabholkar et al. (1996). The critical
concepts associated with this theme include “sales”, “location”, “items”, “size”, “line” (i.e.
checkout line), “order”, “brandName”. More interestingly, this theme is closely related to
“online” and “competitorStores”. This theme is also associated with “holidayName” as most
stores have sales promotion during holiday seasons. The following are a few reviews that are
representative of this dimension:
. . .The rest of the store I do not mind. It’s well organized and occasionally you can find good sales.
. . .I really like this [storeName] location . . . Great location within the Oakville downtown shops. Only
downside is hard to find street parking, and you can only park for 1 hour.
. . .The only thing this [storeName] store has going for it is the convenience of its location.
Return. The last theme, “return”, with a word count of 2931, is closely related to “order”,
“trying”, “money”, “manager”, “bad”, “problem”, “perceivedValue”, “online”, “online order”,
and time related concepts (i.e. “minutes”, “week”, “days”). Given the fact that this theme is
highly associated with one-star reviews, an examination of the reviews indicates that this
theme is primarily about problem handling, order returning and re-patronage intention.
Further examination of the concept map also reveals that this theme is split by two
relatively distinct clusters of concepts. The upper left sphere of this theme, where adjoins the
“customer” theme, clusters concepts of “manager”, “bad”, “problem”; and the lower right
sphere of this theme, where adjoins the “store” theme, clusters concepts of “order”, “home”,
“online”, “trying”, “online order”. The former, generally relating to the policy and problem-
solving dimensions identified by Dabholkar et al. (1996), has highlighted the role of store
managers. The reviews reveal that a lack of service orientation from the management level
often leads to poor service and negative behavioral consequences. The latter, which has not
been documented in the existing literature, reveals how the presence of online channels
interacts with the perceived offline retail quality. Given the novelty of this finding, we decide
to separate the return theme into “manager” and “online”.
Online. In this section we further explore the “online” concept, which has a word count of
1906. Comparing with online stores, better customer service is the reason that consumers
might remain loyal to offline channels, which is reflected in many of the reviews. It is also
evident that service quality, as consumers’ perception, has been impacted by the online
channels in multiple ways. First, many consumers have higher expectation about service
IJSMS quality in the offline channels, due to the threats of the online channels. The consumers feel
they are empowered to switch channels and thus entitled to receive good services at the
offline channel. Second, consumers expect that the prices at the online channels to be lower.
They constantly compare the prices at the offline stores with online channels. Most sporting
goods are shopping goods as they are typically valuable, consumers often have significant
shopping involvement, such as quality inspection and price comparisons. Consumers will be
pleasantly surprised when they find out that the offline channel has competitive prices vis-
a-vis the online channels.
However, with the easiness of price comparison enabled by smartphone and price checker
apps, the online channels have pushed the offline channels to bundle their products with
creative value-adding services. Branded variants (e.g. exclusive products; Bergen et al., 1996;
Shugan, 1983), in-house brands (i.e. private labels) and service bundles are effective tools to
avoid fierce price competition. However, smaller store may not have the bargaining power
with the manufacturers to create their own product variants or private products, only the
service bundle may be feasible. This again highlights the importance of customer service.
. . .Will be back to this store and purchase other items instead of online. What a difference being able
to customize an item and have accessories installed at the same stop. You can always order shoes
online, but it does not beat trying them in on the store and getting advice from an actual runner.
Third, although most transactions of sporting goods occur in the offline channels, the
e-commerce is on the rise. Leading sporting goods chains are prioritizing their investment on
online channels (Dick’s Sporting Goods, 2018). Many sporting goods stores have their own
online stores; they may have “buy online pick up in store” service; they may have “in store
preorder” service if they do not have items in stock; they may have an “online stock check”
service. To compete with dominant online channels, going online is another strategic move
for most sporting goods stores. However, the integration of the online channels and offline
channel becomes a new challenge in running a sporting goods store, as evident in the
following reviews.
Returning an online order to an offline channel:
. . . Ordered a pair of shoes online and they did not fit brought them to a [brandName] corporate store
which they are listed on [brandName] website as and the brilliant manager proceeds to tell me he has
never encounter a return like this and do not know how to do it or even go about finding a resolution
to my problem. . .
Online inventory check:
. . . I called store based on online inventory indicating that the store had 1 pair of the gloves that I was
looking for. . . After driving the 30 miles to this location they did not have anything on hold for me. . .
In store ordering:
. . .So because their inventory was so messed up, we proceeded to check out . . . we were buying 2
pairs of shoes from the store, then 3 pairs from online since sizes were not available in the store. . . .
This was a 30 minute þ process and was A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME!
Through this analysis, it becomes apparent that online channels have exerted significant
influences on consumers’ evaluation of retail quality. More importantly, an effective
integration of online–offline channels has become a new dimension of retail quality (Chiu
et al., 2011; Ofek et al., 2011).
Retail quality of sporting goods stores
As indicated in Figure 1, some identified circles overlap with each other, whereas others do
not. The overlapped areas suggest that the themes are semantically related to each other; the
nonoverlapping on the hand suggests distinctiveness of the themes. There are some
interesting observations by examining the overlapped themes and concepts: “love” is at the Sport retail
intersection of “staff” and “product”; “online” and “perceivedValue” are at the intersection of quality
“store” and “return”; “problem” and “review” are at the intersection of “customer” and
“return”; “product”, “inventory” and “deal” are at the intersection of “prices” and “store”.
Furthermore, we can hypothetically draw a line to separate the five themes into two
(Figure 1): the upper left being customer service and the lower right being store aspects,
which more or less is consistent with the existing conceptualization of retailing quality
(Westbrook, 1981). The current analysis, however, provides not only empirical evidence for
the relative separation of these two themes but also insights about where these two themes
interact. It seems that there are two main interaction areas (i.e. overlapping areas): the first
being “staff” and “product”, and the second “manager” and “online”. Additionally, this
separation can be confirmed by adjusting the theme size of the mind map to 97%, when only
two themes would emerge.
Although the themes and concepts identified by Leximancer have provided valuable
insights about quality of sporting goods retailing, they are indicative in nature. Based on the
above analysis, we re-name the themes to better reflect the meanings of the concepts and re-
cluster them in a hierarchical structure. Table 3 presents the final conceptual model of Retail
Quality of Sporting Goods Stores (RQSGS). On the very top level, customer service and store
aspects serve as the two primary dimensions of RQSGS. Under customer service, three main
themes, including holistic experience, manager and staff have emerged. Holistic experience
focuses mainly on customer care and shopping experience. Manager highlights the role of
managers in elevating retail quality; problem handling, terms of sales, and a prompt
refunding policy have been particularly pronounced in this dimension. Staff are the frontline
service individuals who typically provide direct customer service to consumers. Helpfulness,
knowledge and friendliness are the three major positive qualities that are valued by
customers. Under store aspects, three main themes, including product, B&M store and
online–offline integration, have emerged. Regarding product, consumers care about price,
selection, quality and brand. Regarding B&M store, consumers care about inventory,

Second-order
dimensions Dimensions Subdimensions Leximancer concepts

Customer service Holistic experience Customer care Care

Shopping Experience
experience
Staff Helpful helpful
Knowledgeable knowledgeable
Friendly friendly
Manager Problem handling manager, owner, problem
Terms of sales money, return
Promptness week, days, minutes
Store aspects Product Price price(s), pricing
Selection selection
Quality quality
Brand brand, brandName
B&M Store Inventory inventory, stores
Location location
In-store sales sales, holidayName
Perceived value perceivedValue, Table 3.
competitorStore The hierarchical model
Online-offline online, order, return of retail quality of
integration sporting goods stores
IJSMS location, sales promotion and perceived value. Finally, online–offline integration (Nguyen
et al., 2018) becomes a salient dimension in RQSGS.

RQSGS vis-a-vis star ratings

Based on the relative positions of the star rating tags in Figure 1 and the numeric
representation of conditional probability of word occurrence in Table 4, it is evident that
different star ratings have focused on different aspects of retail quality. A general conclusion
is that one-star and five-star reviews focus more on customer service, whereas two- to four-
star reviews focus more on store aspects. Figure 2 presents a heat map of the occurrences of
concepts by normalizing the data points in Table 4. Green color on the figure indicates more
likely to occur and red color least likely to occur. By grouping concepts into their respective
dimensions, Figure 3 presents the probability of dimensions by star ratings. It is evident that
from one-star to five-star ratings, some dimensions are monotonically increasing (i.e. Staff),
some monotonically decreasing (i.e. Manager), some peaks at the middle (i.e. Product and
B&M Store) and others peak at the extremes (i.e. Holistic Experience).
Customer Service. Holistic experience, as indicated by “care” and “experience”, is
mentioned more often in one-star and two-star reviews, followed by five-star reviews, three-
star and four-star reviews do not discuss this theme as often. Regarding positive
characteristics of staff, as indicated by “helpful”, “knowledgeable” and “friendly”, we can
roughly observe a positive correlation between star ratings and frequency of word

Concept Counts One-star Two-star Three-star Four-star Five-star

Care 1970 10 9 6 4 7
experience 4856 21 19 15 13 18
helpful 5514 6 11 17 25 23
knowledgeable 4674 4 9 9 15 22
friendly 7157 13 19 21 30 29
manager 1805 20 12 7 4 3
owner 2300 14 8 4 4 8
problem 1834 11 11 8 6 5
money 2227 20 14 9 7 5
return 2937 28 20 9 8 6
week 2464 17 15 7 7 7
days 1791 13 10 7 5 5
minutes 2724 20 18 10 9 7
prices 9170 29 41 49 42 29
selection 4936 6 21 35 30 15
quality 2092 5 7 9 10 7
Brand 1842 6 9 11 10 5
brandName 936 3 6 6 6 2
Inventory 684 2 3 4 4 2
Location 3293 13 17 21 19 8
holidayName 432 1 2 3 3 1
Sales 4116 22 24 25 21 9
competitorStores 479 2 2 4 3 1
perceivedValue 436 2 2 2 2 1
Online 1906 11 12 10 7 5
Note(s): The numbers on the columns 3–7 mean the frequencies of word occurrences. For instance, in each 100
Table 4. one-star reviews, the concept “care” would occur 10 times; whereas in each 100 four-star reviews, the same
Frequencies of concept concept would only occur four times. Whereas some concepts are distributed relatively evenly among all
occurrences in every groups, other concepts are more or less prominent with certain group. For instance, “knowledgeable” and
100 reviews “sales” with five-star reviews; “manager” with one-star reviews
 RATING ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE Sport retail
care 1 0.83 0.33 0 0.5 quality
experience 1 0.75 0.25 0 0.63
helpful 0 0.26 0.58 1 0.89
knowledgeable 0 0.28 0.28 0.61 1
friendly 0 0.35 0.47 1 0.94
manager 1 0.53 0.24 0.06 0
owner 1 0.4 0 0 0.4
problem 1 1 0.5 0.17 0
money 1 0.6 0.27 0.13 0
return 1 0.64 0.14 0.09 0 Figure 2.
week 1 0.8 0 0 0 A heat map of the
occurrences of
days 1 0.63 0.25 0 0 concepts by
minutes 1 0.85 0.23 0.15 0 normalizing the data
prices 0 0.6 1 0.65 0 points in Table 3 into 0-
selection 0 0.52 1 0.83 0.31 1 range. For each
concept (i.e. row of
quality 0 0.4 0.8 1 0.4 data), the following
brand 0.17 0.67 1 0.83 0 normalization formula
brandName 0.25 1 1 1 0 was used:
xi − minðxÞ
inventory 0 0.26 1 0.71 0 zi ¼ maxðxÞ − minðxÞ,
where x ¼ ðx1 ; . . . ; x5 Þ
location 0.38 0.69 1 0.85 0 and zi is the normalized
holidayName 0 0.5 1 1 0 data. Green color on the
sales 0.81 0.94 1 0.75 0 figure indicates more
competitorStores 0.41 0.49 1 0.6 0 likely to occur and red
color least likely
perceivedValue 1 0.42 0.32 0.79 0 to occur
online 0.86 1 0.71 0.29 0

occurrences under this theme. Five-star and four-star reviews are strongly related to the
positive characteristics of staff. Whereas four-star reviews are more likely to use “helpful”
and “friendly” than five-star reviews; five-star reviews are more likely to use
“knowledgeable”. “Knowledgeable” is one the two most diagnostic terms (the other being
“sales”) that separates five-star reviews from the rest. With regard to the manager dimension,
we observe a roughly monotonic decreasing occurrence of such words as “manager”,
“owner”, “problem”, “money”, “return”, “week”, “days”, and “minutes”, from one-star to five-
star reviews. One-star and two-star reviews tend to focus much more on this dimension than
the rest.
Store Aspects. Regarding price, selection, quality and brand of the product dimension, we
observe that three-star and four-star reviews tend to discuss most often, followed by two-star
reviews; one-star and five-star reviews tend to discuss least. The same phenomenon holds for
the location, promotion aspects of the B&M store dimension. Furthermore, five-star reviews
tend to discuss “sales” the least. Three-star and four-star reviews are strongly related to the
B&M store dimension. Particularly, these reviews are closely related to “competitorStore”
and “online” concepts. In those reviews, a comparison with competing stores, such as
Amazon and Walmart, or other online channels is often mentioned, indicating an assessment
of quality is anchored with competing stores and influenced by online channels. Two-star and
one-star reviews are strongly related the manager dimension. Essentially, the lack of service
from the management level leads to order returning behavior and negative repatronage
intentions. Value-laden words, such as “worth” and “value”, are often mentioned in these
reviews. “Online” again is a closely connected concept, indicating impacts of online channels.
IJSMS Holistic Experience Staff Manager
Product B&M Store Online-offline Integration
1

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

0.5

0.4

0.3

0.2

Figure 3. 0.1
Likelihood of
dimension occurrences
by star ratings 0
O N E-ST AR T WO -ST AR T HREE-ST AR FOUR -ST AR FIVE-ST AR

Discussion
Sporting goods retailing is a significant supporting sector of the sports industry
(Eschenfelder and Li, 2007). The main objective of this research is to investigate the retail
quality of sporting goods stores using a relatively novel approach – text mining. Drawing
upon themes and concepts extracted by Leximancer on voluminous consumer self-generated
online reviews, this study identifies key quality dimensions within sporting goods retailing.
We subsequently re-theme and re-cluster the Leximancer map and propose a model of Retail
Quality of Sporting Goods Stores (RQSGS). Consistent with the existing retail service quality
literature (Dabholkar et al., 1996; Simmers and Keith, 2015), this model takes a broad
perspective of retail quality and identifies customer service and store aspects as two higher-
order dimensions within RQSGS. Customer service includes holistic experience, manager and
staff; store aspects include product, B&M store and online–offline integration. These two
dimensions are relatively distinct, but they also interact through store, manager, staff and
product. Furthermore, this study explores the relative importance of each concept to different
levels of ratings. To our knowledge, this is also the first study examining service quality in
the context of sporting goods retailing.

Theoretical and practical implications

The current study to certain extent cross-validated the existing retailing literature that is
developed on alternative methods (Acquila-Natale and Iglesias-Pradas, 2020; Dabholkar et al.,
1996; Simmers and Keith, 2015): most themes identified in RQSGS are consistent with the
existing literature. Whereas the emerging multi-channel retailing quality literature has
focused on the integration of consumer experiences in both physical stores and online stores
(Acquila-Natale and Iglesias-Pradas, 2020; Murfield et al., 2017; Zhang et al., 2019), it does not Sport retail
fit the sporting goods retailing completely as sporting goods stores rely on revenues from quality
physical stores. The current study in the context of sporting goods retailing revealed several
points that had not been discussed in the existing literature. We focus our discussion on these
findings.
First, knowledgeable staff is ultimate important to create satisfied consumers in sport
retailing. Staff has been the focus of service quality literature: four out of the five SERVQUAL
dimensions, namely reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy, are staff related. In
retailing literature, the importance of sales staff has also been highlighted (Simmers and
Keith, 2015). However, the existing literature often considers only the sales staff. In the
current context, we do not limit staff to sales staff. Instead, staff are the frontline employees
who help with the sales and/or provide other value-added services (e.g. a biomechanics
specialist in a specialty running shoe store, a club repairer in a golf pro shop). Whereas three
positive characteristics of the staff – knowledge, friendliness, and helpfulness – were
identified important in sporting goods retailing business, “knowledgeable”, however, is one
the most diagnostic concepts that separate five-star reviews from four-star reviews.
Second, managers play a critical role in elevating consumers’ satisfaction. Manager,
loosely referring to both owners and professional managers, has three subdimensions:
problem handling, terms of sales and promptness. Whereas the role of frontline staff has been
acknowledged in the literature, the role of manager is less clear. Our results suggest that
consumers tend to blame managers/owners for poor service and experience. It might be due
to the fact that many sporting goods stores are small local businesses. Traditionally, sporting
goods retailers are merchandise movers and are typically low in service orientation (Garg and
Chan, 1997). Faced with severe competition and easiness of price comparisons due to national
branding, sporting goods stores are urged to differentiate themselves from their local and
online competitors. Among exclusive distribution, branded variants, private labels and
service bundling, augmenting merchandises with value-adding services become one of very
few viable approaches sporting goods stores might take (Homburg et al., 2002). Therefore, the
demarcation of merchandise and service has become increasingly blurred. Sporting goods
stores are no longer in the merchandise mover business; rather, they are shifting towards
service business. As a result, managers and owners’ service orientation must be emphasized
in the current marketing landscape (Garg and Chan, 1997; Homburg et al., 2002). Store
policies, such as return/exchange, warranty, credit cards, installation, are the materialization
of manager’s service orientation philosophy.
Third, online–offline integration is a new dimension of retail quality. Consistent with the
existing literature, the online channels have considerable impacts on consumers’ shopping
behavior. Consumers rely on the online channels to find out product information, stocking
information, store information, and pricing information; or to place orders online and then
pick them up in store. As a result, traditional B&M stores have started to expand their online
presence. However, the lack of effective integration between the online and offline channels
has created much consumers’ dismay. An effective integration of the channels is likely an
important area of investment for sporting goods stores.
Finally, hedonic and social values are important to create superior satisfaction.
Ostensibly, from our data, extreme reviews (i.e. one-star and five-star) tend to focus on
customer service and mediocre reviews (i.e. two-star, three-star and four-star reviews) tend to
focus on store aspects. Fundamentally, we argue that different value dimensions have played
a role in consumers’ satisfaction. Rintam€aki (2006) has decomposed values of shopping into
utilitarian, hedonic and social values. Utilitarian values focus on monetary savings,
convenience of shopping; hedonic values focus on emotional, entertainment aspects of
shopping; and social values focus on the symbolism and relationships. It is evident from the
review data that utilitarian value is the bedrock of shopping experience, but is in itself often
IJSMS unable to produce ultimate satisfaction. Verhoef et al. (2009) suggest social environment,
service interface, retail atmosphere, assortment, price, customer experiences in alternative
channels and retail brand are the major drivers of customer experiences. In the context of
sport retailing, there are still rooms to grow consumers’ experience by utilizing the drivers
mentioned in Verhoef et al. (2009).
It should also be noted that sporting goods retailing only has subtle differences with
general retailing. These differences are not only nuanced but also may be shared by other
specific retailing contexts. For instance, sporting goods are mostly shopping goods therefore
free riding is more likely; grocery retailing typically does not share this characteristic but
electronics retailing might; in the grocery retailing case, friendly staff might be more
important than knowledgeable staff but in the latter case the opposite might be true. Piano is
often considered as shopping goods, but piano retailing might have much less free riding due
to limited distribution, therefore online–offline integration might be less an issue. Many
sporting goods stores are small in scale and cater to local markets, therefore managers and
owners may play a more significant role in delivering services. Sporting goods stores are
often augmenting their products with ancillary services such as gait analysis, repair services,
renting services or training classes, therefore the definition of staff may be much broader than
other retailing contexts. Sporting goods are mostly national/international brands that are
distributed across many channels therefore price competition is severe in comparison with
other retailing such as high fashion. Nonetheless, it is almost always possible to find another
context that will share the same characteristics with sports retailing.

Limitations and future research

One challenge and limitation of this research is the identification of sporting goods stores.
Although the NAICS has provided a straightforward definition of sporting goods stores, from
market definition point of view, limiting stores to NAICS 451110 may misidentify true players
in this industry, thus inappropriate (Shugan, 2011). For instance, both Walmart and Amazon
do not belong to NAICS 451110. As a compromise, this study relies on stores’ self-
identification. We include all the stores who claim they sell sporting goods. On the Yelp
platform, many gun shops and shooting ranges are listed as sporting goods stores; granted,
shops sell sporting guns are NAICS 451110 per the NAICS. Also, in the dataset, we have a
large proportion of bike shops which both sell and repair bikes. We even included a small
number of vision centers that may sell eyeglasses for sports use. As Leximancer extract
concepts based on frequency, the large amount of gun shops and bike shops we have in the
dataset could have biased the findings. Hence, we excluded some bike and gun shops by
assigning “gun(s)” and “bike(s)” “bicycle(s)” as killed concepts. Essentially, we underweight
concepts associated with bike and gun shops. Due to the lack of a precise definition of
sporting goods stores, the applicability of RQSGS to certain sporting goods stores warrants
further research.
A second challenge of this research is the representativeness of Yelp reviewers. We do not
believe Yelp reviewers are a representative sample of all consumers. However, as the unit of
analysis is individual review instead of individual reviewer, at the issue really is the
representativeness of the reviews; and the exact nature of this concern cannot be empirically
assessed. We do have confidence in our findings: as in many qualitative studies, a saturation
of themes can often be achieved with a small number of participants. Given the large amount
of reviews we have, the topics that are covered by the current study are likely more extensive
than the traditional methods. The chance of omission will be smaller. This approach
essentially has the same spirit as the “maximum variance sampling” (aka heterogeneous
sampling) technique: the goal is not to be representative of the average views on an issue but
to look at it from all angles. The key empirical task is to determine the weights of these
concepts. Although a closer examination of rare concepts will be of interest in our future Sport retail
research, it is beyond the scope of the current project. quality
The generalizability of RQSGS beyond the sporting goods retailing industry is a
secondary consideration of this project. We do not intend to claim the framework works for
other retailing businesses, as different sectors likely have their own salient characteristics.
However, we do believe that the framework provides a supplementary foundation for other
retailing contexts; and the RQSGS may be generalizable to other retailing businesses that
share similar characteristics with sporting goods retailing (such as music instruments stores).
This research was exploratory with the goal of producing a better understanding of
service quality in sporting goods retailing. We neither examine service quality relating to
specific types of stores nor quantify the relative importance of each dimension. Lastly,
validating the findings from text mining remains a promising task. Cross-validating findings
based on Humphreys and Wang (2018) strategy can be fruitful. Future studies may address
these topics.

References
Acquila-Natale, E. and Iglesias-Pradas, S. (2020), “How to measure quality in multi-channel retailing
and not die trying”, Journal of Business Research, Vol. 109, pp. 38-48, doi: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.
10.041.
Aggarwal, P., Vaidyanathan, R. and Venkatesh, A. (2009), “Using lexical semantic analysis to derive
online brand positions: an application to retail marketing research”, Journal of Retailing, Vol. 85
No. 2, pp. 145-158, doi: 10.1016/j.jretai.2009.03.001.
Anagnostopoulos, C. and Bason, T. (2015), “Mapping the first 10 years with Leximancer: themes and
concepts in the sports management international journal choregia”, Sports Management
International Journal, Vol. 11 No. 1, pp. 24-41.
Ang, J.C., Mirzal, A., Haron, H. and Hamed, H.N.A. (2016), “Supervised, unsupervised, and semi-
supervised feature selection: a review on gene selection”, IEEE/ACM Transactions on
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Vol. 13 No. 5, pp. 971-989, doi: 10.1109/TCBB.2015.
2478454.
Bennett, G., Henson, R.K. and Zhang, J. (2003), “Generation Y’s perceptions of the action sports
industry segment”, Journal of Sport Management, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 95-115.
Berezina, K., Bilgihan, A., Cobanoglu, C. and Okumus, F. (2016), “Understanding satisfied and
dissatisfied hotel customers: text mining of online hotel reviews”, Journal of Hospitality
Marketing and Management, Vol. 25 No. 1, pp. 1-24, doi: 10.1080/19368623.2015.983631.
Bergen, M., Dutta, S. and Shugan, S.M. (1996), “Branded variants: a retail perspective”, Journal of
Marketing Research, Vol. 33 No. 1, pp. 9-19.
Berger, J., Humphreys, A., Ludwig, S., Moe, W.W., Netzer, O. and Schweidel, D.A.J.J.o. M. (2019), “Uniting
the tribes: using text for marketing insight”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 84 No. 1, pp. 1-25.
Cabela’s (2016), “Cabela’s incorporated form 10-k”, available at: http://www.annualreports.com/
Click/7867.
U.S. Census (2018), “Advance monthly sales for retail and food service”, available at: https://www.
census.gov/economic-indicators/#qfr_retail.
U.S. Census (2019), “North American industry classification system definition: 451110 - sporting goods
stores”, available at: https://www.naics.com/naics-code-description/?code5451110.
Chakrabarti, S., Trehan, D. and Makhija, M. (2018), “Assessment of service quality using text mining –
evidence from private sector banks in India”, International Journal of Bank Marketing, Vol. 36
No. 4, pp. 594-615, doi: 10.1108/IJBM-04-2017-0070.
Chelladurai, P. and Chang, K. (2000), “Targets and standards of quality in sport services”, Sport
Management Review, Vol. 3 No. 1, pp. 1-22.
IJSMS Chiu, H.-C., Hsieh, Y.-C., Roan, J., Tseng, K.-J. and Hsieh, J.-K. (2011), “The challenge for multichannel
services: cross-channel free-riding behavior”, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications,
Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 268-277.
Cronin, J.J. Jr and Taylor, S.A. (1992), “Measuring service quality: a reexamination and extension”,
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 56 No. 3, pp. 55-68.
Cronin, J.J. Jr and Taylor, S.A. (1994), “SERVPERF versus SERVQUAL: reconciling performance-
based and perceptions-minus-expectations measurement of service quality”, Journal of
Marketing, Vol. 58 No. 1, pp. 125-131.
Dabholkar, P., Thorpe, D. and Rentz, J. (1996), “A measure of service quality for retail stores: scale
development and validation”, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 24 No. 1, pp. 3-16.
Davis-Sramek, B., Droge, C., Mentzer, J.T. and Myers, M.B. (2009), “Creating commitment and loyalty
behavior among retailers: what are the roles of service quality and satisfaction?”, Journal of the
Academy of Marketing Science, Vol. 37 No. 4, pp. 440-454.
Dick’s Sporting Goods (2018), “2017 annual report”, available at: www.annualreports.com/Company/
dicks-sporting-goods-inc.
Duan, W., Cao, Q., Yu, Y. and Levy, S. (2013), “Mining online user-generated content: using sentiment
analysis technique to study hotel service quality”, Paper presented at the 2013 46th Hawaii
International Conference on System Sciences.
Eschenfelder, M.J. and Li, M. (2007), Economics of Sport, Morgantown, Fitness Information
Technology, WV.
Foroughi, B., Iranmanesh, M., Gholipour, H.F. and Hyun, S.S. (2019), “Examining relationships among
process quality, outcome quality, delight, satisfaction and behavioural intentions in fitness
centres in Malaysia”, International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship, Vol. 20 No. 3,
pp. 374-389, doi: 10.1108/IJSMS-08-2018-0078.
Gagliano, K.B. and Hathcote, J. (1994), “Customer expectations and perceptions of service quality in
retail apparel specialty stores”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 8 No. 1, pp. 60-69.
Gale. (2018), Encyclopedia of American Industries: Sporting Goods Stores, Gale Cengage, Farmington
Hills, MI, Vol. 2.
Garg, R.K. and Chan, K.K. (1997), “Service orientation and small business marketing”, Journal of
Professional Services Marketing, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 131-143, doi: 10.1300/J090v15n02_10.
Gr€onroos, C.J.E.J.o. m. (1984), “A service quality model and its marketing implications”, Vol. 18 No. 4,
pp. 36-44.
Homburg, C., Hoyer, W.D. and Fassnacht, M. (2002), “Service orientation of a retailer’s business
strategy: dimensions, antecedents, and performance outcomes”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 66
No. 4, pp. 86-101.
Humphreys, A. and Wang, R.J.-H. (2018), “Automated text analysis for consumer research”, Journal of
Consumer Research, Vol. 44 No. 6, pp. 1274-1306, doi: 10.1093/jcr/ucx104.
Hyland, R. (2018), Ibisworld Industry Report 45111 Sporting Goods Stores in the Us.
Jain, P. and Aggarwal, V.S. (2018), “Developing a service quality scale in context of organized grocery
retail of India”, Management Decision, Vol. 56 No. 9, pp. 1969-1990, doi: 10.1108/MD-08-2017-0790.
Janda, S. (2002), “Consumer perceptions of internet retail service quality”, International Journal of
Service Industry Management, Vol. 13 No. 5, pp. 412-431, doi: 10.1108/09564230210447913.
Jiang, B. and Zhang, X.J.M.S. (2011), “How does a retailer’s service plan affect a manufacturer’s
warranty?”, Vol. 57 No. 4, pp. 727-740.
Kamerer, D. (2014), “Understanding the yelp review filter: an exploratory study”, Retrieved 2019/6/29
available at: https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5436/4111.
Kim, D. and Kim, S. (1995), “Quesc: an instrument for assessing the service quality of sport centers in
korea”, Journal of Sport Management, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 208-220.
Ko, Y. and Pastore, D. (2005), “A hierarchical model of service quality for the recreational sport Sport retail
industry”, Sport Marketing Quarterly, Vol. 14, pp. 84-97.
quality
Kotler, P. and Keller, K.L. (2006), Marketing Management, 12 ed., Person Prentice Hall, NJ.
Krippendorff, K. (2004), Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology, Sage Publications,
Newbury Park, CA.
Lam, E.T.C., Zhang, J.J. and Jensen, B.E. (2005), “Service quality assessment scale (sqas): an instrument
for evaluating service quality of health-fitness clubs”, Measurement in Physical Education and
Exercise Science, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 79-111.
Leximancer (2011), “Leximancer manual”, available at: https://doc.leximancer.com/doc/Leximancer
Manual.pdf.
Lin, H.-H. (2012), “The effect of multi-channel service quality on mobile customer loyalty in an online-
and-mobile retail context”, Service Industries Journal, Vol. 32 No. 11, pp. 1865-1882, doi: 10.1080/
02642069.2011.559541.
Mao, L.L. and Zhang, J.J.J.J.o. A.M.T. (2012), “Exploring the factors affecting the perceived program
quality of international sports education programs”, The Case of a Chinese Sports University,
Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 14-35.
Martinelli, E. and Balboni, B. (2012), “Retail service quality as a key activator of grocery store loyalty”,
Service Industries Journal, Vol. 32 No. 14, pp. 2233-2247.
Mcauliffe, J.D. and Blei, D.M. (2008), “Supervised topic models”, Paper presented at the Neural
Information Processing Systems Conference.
McDonald, M., Sutton, W. and Milne, G. (1995), “Teamqual measuring service quality in professional
team sports”, Sport Marketing Quarterly, Vol. 4 No. 2, pp. 9-15.
Mehta, S.C., Lalwani, A.K. and Han, S.L. (2000), “Service quality in retailing: relative efficiency of
alternative measurement scales for different product-service environments”, International
Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 62-72.
Mukherjee, A., Venkataraman, V., Liu, B. and Glance, N.S. (2013), “What yelp fake review filter might be
doing?”, Paper Presented at the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and
Social Media.
Murfield, M., Boone, C.A., Rutner, P. and Thomas, R. (2017), “Investigating logistics service quality in
omni-channel retailing”, International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics
Management, Vol. 47 No. 4, pp. 263-296, doi: 10.1108/IJPDLM-06-2016-0161.
Netzer, O., Feldman, R., Goldenberg, J. and Fresko, M. (2012), “Mine your own business: market-
structure surveillance through text mining”, Marketing Science, Vol. 31 No. 3, pp. 521-543, doi:
10.1287/mksc.1120.0713.
Nguyen, D.H., Leeuw, S. and Dullaert, W.E.H. (2018), “Consumer behaviour and order fulfilment in
online retailing: a systematic review”, International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 20
No. 2, pp. 255-276, doi: 10.1111/ijmr.12129.
NunezMir, G.C., Iannone, B.V., Pijanowski, B.C., Kong, N. and Fei, S. (2016), “Automated content
analysis: addressing the big literature challenge in ecology and evolution”, Methods in Ecology
Evolution, Vol. 7 No. 11, pp. 1262-1272.
Ofek, E., Katona, Z. and Sarvary, M. (2011), ““Bricks and clicks”: the impact of product returns on the
strategies of multichannel retailers”, Marketing Science, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 42-60.
Oliver, R.L. (1980), “A cognitive model of the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction decisions”,
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 17 No. 4, pp. 460-469.
Papadimitriou, D. and Karteroliotis, K. (2000), “The service quality expectations in private sport and
fitness centers: a reexamination of the factor structure”, Sport Marketing Quarterly, Vol. 9 No. 3,
pp. 157-164.
Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1985), “A conceptual model of service quality and its
implications for future research”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 49 No. 4, pp. 41-50.
IJSMS Parasuraman, A., Zeithaml, V.A. and Berry, L.L. (1988), “SERVQUAL: a multiple-item scale for
measuring consumer perceptions of service quality”, Journal of Retailing, Vol. 64 No. 1, pp. 12-40.
Ramage, D., Hall, D., Nallapati, R. and Manning, C.D. (2009), “Labeled lda: a supervised topic model for
credit attribution in multi-labeled corpora”, Paper presented at the 2009 Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing.
Rintam€aki, T. (2006), “Decomposing the value of department store shopping into utilitarian, hedonic
and social dimensions”, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management, Vol. 34
No. 1, pp. 6-24.
Roberts, M.E., Stewart, B.M., Tingley, D., Lucas, C., Leder-Luis, J., Gadarian, S.K. and Rand, D.G.
(2014), “Structural topic models for open-ended survey responses”, American Journal of Political
Science, Vol. 58 No. 4, pp. 1064-1082, doi: 10.1111/ajps.12103.
Salton, G. (1989), Automatic Text Processing: The Transformation, Analysis, and Retrieval of
Information by Computer, Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, Vol. 169.
Sancihak, L. and Seuna-Chana, L. (2013), “The influence of sport sponsorship communication on sport
fans’ rating of retail service quality”, International Journal of Sport Communication, Vol. 6 No. 3,
pp. 312-324.
Shilbury, D. (2012), “Competition: the heart and soul of sport management”, Journal of Sport
Management, Vol. 26 No. 1, pp. 1-10.
Shugan, S.M. (1983), Branded Variants, University of Chicago, Center for Research in Marketing,
Chicago, IL.
Shugan, S.M. (2011), Lecture on Market Definition, Personal Collection of Steven Shugan. University of
Florida, Gainesville, FL.
Simmers, C.S. and Keith, N.K. (2015), “Measuring retail store service quality: the disparity between the
retail service quality scale (RSQS) and comment cards”, Academy of Marketing Studies Journal,
Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 117-126.
Siu, N.Y. and Cheung, T.-H.J. (2001), “A measure of retail service quality”, Marketing Intelligence
Planning, Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 88-96.
Siu, N.Y. and Chow, D.K. (2004), “Service quality in grocery retailing: the study of a Japanese supermarket
in Hong Kong”, Journal of International Consumer Marketing, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 71-87.
Smith, A.E. and Humphreys, M.S. (2006), “Evaluation of unsupervised semantic mapping of natural
language with Leximancer concept mapping”, Behavior Research Methods, Vol. 38 No. 2,
pp. 262-279.
Smith, A.E. (2003), “Automatic extraction of semantic networks from text using Leximancer”, Paper
presented at the Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for
Computational Linguistics, Edmonton, Canada.
Statista (2018), “Sporting goods industry-statistics and facts”, Retrieved 2019/6/29 available at: https://
www.statista.com/topics/961/sporting-goods/.
Teas, R. (1993), “Expectations, performance evaluation, and consumers’ perceptions of quality”,
Journal of Marketing, Vol. 57 No. 4, pp. 18-34.
Thanawala, S. (2018), “California high court: yelp can’t be ordered to remove posts”, available at:
https://apnews.com/531970dd2b8d482d82ec192dd28b0240/California-high-court:-Yelp-can’t-be-
ordered-to-remove-posts.
Trocchia, P.J. and Janda, S. (2003), “How do consumers evaluate internet retail service quality?”,
Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 17 No. 3, pp. 243-253.
Tseng, C., Wu, B., Morrison, A.M., Zhang, J. and Chen, Y.-c. (2015), “Travel blogs on China as a destination image
formation agent: a qualitative analysis using Leximancer”, Tourism Management, Vol. 46, pp. 347-358.
Verhoef, P.C., Lemon, K.N., Parasuraman, A., Roggeveen, A., Tsiros, M. and Schlesinger, L.A. (2009),
“Customer experience creation: determinants, dynamics and management strategies”, Journal of
Retailing, Vol. 85 No. 1, pp. 31-41, doi: 10.1016/j.jretai.2008.11.001.
Westbrook, R. (1981), “Sources of consumer satisfaction with retail outlets”, Journal of Retailing, Sport retail
Vol. 57 No. 3, pp. 68-85.
quality
Yang, Z. and Fang, X. (2004), “Online service quality dimensions and their relationships with
satisfaction”, International Journal of Service Industry Management, Vol. 15 No. 3, pp. 302-326,
doi: 10.1108/09564230410540953.
Yang, Z., Peterson Robin, T. and Cai, S. (2003), “Services quality dimensions of internet retailing: an
exploratory analysis”, Journal of Services Marketing, Vol. 17 No. 7, pp. 685-700, doi: 10.1108/
08876040310501241.
Yang, Z., Jun, M. and Peterson Robin, T. (2004), “Measuring customer perceived online service
quality”, International Journal of Operations and Production Management, Vol. 24 No. 11,
pp. 1149-1174, doi: 10.1108/01443570410563278.
Yoshida, M. (2017), “Consumer experience quality: a review and extension of the sport management
literature”, Sport Management Review, Vol. 20 No. 5, pp. 427-442.
Yu, C.H., Jannasch-Pennell, A. and DiGangi, S.J.Q.R. (2011a), “Compatibility between text mining and
qualitative research in the perspectives of grounded theory, content analysis, and reliability”,
Qualitative Report, Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 730-744.
Yu, C.H., Jannasch-Pennell, A. and DiGangi, S.J.Q.R. (2011b), “Compatibility between text mining and
qualitative research in the perspectives of grounded theory, content analysis, and reliability”,
Vol. 16 No. 3, pp. 730-744.
Zeithaml, V.A., Parasuraman, A. and Berry, L.L. (1990), Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer
Perceptions and Expectations, Free Press, New York.
Zeithaml, V.A., Berry, L.L. and Parasuraman, A. (1996), “The behavioral consequences of service
quality”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 60 No. 2, pp. 31-46.
Zhang, J., Onal, S., Das, R., Helminsky, A. and Das, S. (2019), “Fulfilment time performance of online
retailers – an empirical analysis”, International Journal of Retail and Distribution Management,
Vol. 47 No. 5, pp. 493-510, doi: 10.1108/IJRDM-10-2017-0237.

Corresponding author
Luke Lunhua Mao can be contacted at: lmao@unm.edu

For instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website:
www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm
Or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com