Designing a Customer Confusion Model over Selecting Follower Sport Equipment

The aim of the present study was to design a customer confusion model over selecting follower sport equipment. This study was descriptive, applied and based on structural equation modeling. The statistical population consisted of all visitors of the 15th International Sport and Sport Equipment Exhibition in Tehran. The size of the sample was determined by structural equation sampling and 98 questionnaires were collected from available samples. The research questionnaire was developed by Delphi technique with the employment of the viewpoints of 6 sport marketing professors of Iran, and its face and content validities were confirmed by several sport marketing professors. Construct validity was reported higher than 0.5 for all factors by convergent validity and the reliability of the questionnaire was measured by Cronbach's alpha and combined reliability and the coefficients of both tests for all factors were greater than 0.7. The hypotheses testing and fitting model were performed by SMARTPLS software. The findings showed a significant effect of imitation of name and appearance on imitating the identity and image of leading brands, and the effect of imitation of the appearance, identity and image of the leading brand on customer confusion was reported as significant. The effect of imitation of the name on customer confusion was not reported as significant. Also, customer confusion, identity imitation and leading brand image had a significant effect on the selection of the follower brand. Hence, it can be said that follower brands mimic leading brands with the aim of creating confusion among customers in order to push them into selecting follower brands instead of leading brands. This marketing trick can replace national products with foreign goods.