Designing a sensory marketing model with emotional attachment to the brand and satisfaction with the sensory experience of customers of sports pools in Alborz province

Today, in the global economy, the survival of many organizations depends on the role of customers, and organizations can no longer be indifferent to customers. Organizations should focus all their activities and capabilities on customer satisfaction, because they are the only source of return of customers' capital. The aim of this research was to designing a sensory marketing model with emotional attachment to the brand and satisfaction with the sensory experience of customers of sports pools in Alborz province The research method is descriptive and of the survey type, which was implemented in the field. The statistical population of this research consisted of an unlimited number of customers of swimming pools in Alborz province. Using Morgan's table, the statistical sample was estimated to be 384 tons, which were selected by non-random cluster sampling from among the members of the statistical population. In order to collect data from the sensory marketing questionnaire of Sang Wan Lee (2012) which consists of 22 questions and has components of sense of sight (6 questions), sense of hearing (4 questions), sense of touch (3 questions), sense of smell 5 questions) and sense of taste (4 questions). Questionnaire of satisfaction from sensory experience made by Bittner and Hubert (1994) which consists of 3 questions. Emotional brand attachment questionnaire made by Hor et al. (2018) which consists of 4 questions. Questionnaires are of closed answer type and the measuring scale of five-choice Likert questions is from 1=completely disagree to 5=completely agree. The face validity of the questionnaires were determined using the corrective comments of sports management professors, and the reliability of the questionnaires was obtained using Cronbach's alpha coefficient test of 0.87, 0.76 and 0.79, respectively. Also, the construct validity of the questionnaires was confirmed through confirmatory factor analysis. In order to analyze the data, descriptive indices and statistical tests of Pearson's correlation coefficient, regression analysis and path analysis were used in SPSS and LISREL statistical software.

The results showed that there is a positive and significant relationship between sensory marketing with emotional attachment (r=0.582, P=0.001) and satisfaction with sensory experience (r=0.466, P=0.001). Based on the results of the regression equation, the dimensions of vision (P=0.003, t=3.01) and touch (P=0.001, t=4.77) have conditions for predicting emotional attachment and vision dimensions (P=0.018) P, t=2.38), touch (P=0.001, t=6.53) and smell (P=0.001, t=3.65) qualify to predict satisfaction from sensory experience. Therefore, considering the values of t and the significance level, the assumption of equality of coefficients with zero is rejected and the aforementioned B coefficients should be kept in the regression equation. The results of the goodness of fit test showed that the ratio of X2 to df (3.79) and the root mean square error (RMSEA) is equal to 0.091. Also, the indices of NFI=0.92, CFI=0.92, IFI=0.94, GFI=0.96 and AGFI=0.97 confirmed the fit of the model. According to the obtained results, sensory marketing has a positive and significant effect on emotional attachment (T-Value=11.89, r=0.87) and satisfaction with sensory experience (T-Value=8.84, r=0.74) ) has it.

Finally, the managers of sports pools should pay special attention to the issue of sensory marketing in order to reduce the costs of the pool on the customers in order to encourage them to their centers, because when they provide their customers with the desired and adapted service quality. He sees with his demands, there is less possibility that he will be attracted to other competitors and use their services. Managers of sports pools can find out about their complaints by setting up a suggestion and complaint box or through a conversation with the customers of the pools or through a survey and try to solve them in order to finally provide acceptable services to the customers. Also, pool managers can put new programs on the agenda in order to maintain long-term relationships with customers. It is suggested that a special group consisting of members of various departments related to identifying customers' feelings should undertake the task of continuous monitoring of service delivery and evaluation of customers' perceptions and feelings of it. In this way, it is possible to guarantee the flexibility of the swimming pools in terms of responding to the needs of customers and to design and implement appropriate programs when needed.