Service quality at sporting events: Is aesthetic quality a missing dimension?

The service quality construct has been long understood as a combination of the quality of a service outcome and the quality of the interactions between customers, frontline employees, and the service environment. Although service quality has been described as a multidimensional, multi-level factor model, the aesthetic aspect of service quality still remains unexplored. The current study is one of the first attempts to develop measures for capturing three dimensions of service quality: aesthetic, technical, and functional. Data were collected from sport spectators in Japan (n = 283) and the United States (n = 343). The results provide evidence for a seven-factor model of service quality, which underlies the three second order dimensions. Furthermore, the effects of the three primary dimensions on respective criterion variables are reported. Including the aesthetic dimension, the results extend previous service quality research that has focused primarily on the functional and technical aspects.