Briefs

Chen-Yueh Chen, Yi-Hsiu Lin, U. of Northern Colorado

... Although data mining has been widely and successfully used in the domain of business operations, data mining in sport is just in its infancy (Fielitz & Scott, 2003; Lefton, 2003). In other words, the sports industry has generally been a poor and light user of data mining (Jutkins, 1998). It turned out that few papers related to data mining in the area of sport were found in sport journals. However, Lewis (2004) pointed out that data mining will become a critical component of selling and marketing sports teams. Similarly, the concept of data mining will become main stream in sports as an effective complementary marketing tool in the future (Martin, 2005). As a result, data mining warrants sport marketing researchers� attention and efforts.

The purpose of the present article was to advocate the data mining approach to be utilized in the sport industry in order to effectively achieve sport organizations� marketing goals. The organization of the current article is as follows: first, definitions and benefits of data mining were discussed; second, successful cases of application of data mining in sport were illustrated; third, proposed techniques of data mining that are appropriate and potentially useful in the sport industry were described followed by discussions and conclusions.

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