INSIGHTS INTO THE ESPORTS CONSUMER

Due to the increasing popularity of eSports novel opportunities occurred for organizations to leverage the evolving monetary potential. A relevant starting point is a better understanding of the engagement of eSport consumers. Following this call, based on assumptions from dual process theories and consumer engagement, the paper at hand aims to better understand the interplay between impulsive (i.e., affect) and reflective systems (i.e., consumer similarity) as predictors of consumer engagement in the context of eSports. Accordingly, we collected a sample with 216 participants with the help of the crowdsourcing marketplace Mechanical Turk. Using a quasi-experimental approach contrasting the factors affect (positive vs. negative) and consumer similarity (high vs. low) as predictors of consumer engagement, our results show support for the assumption that both systems explain a disjunctive part of variance, with the impulsive system (i.e., affect) being the empirically richer predictor. Furthermore, we find an interaction effect between both types of processes. We discuss the contribution of our analyses and identify potential paths for future research.