Which Professional Sport Team Has the Best Marketing Performance in Driving Attendance? The Stochastic Frontier Approach

While assessment of team-level marketing performance for a professional sport franchise is important for both the team marketer and the researcher to develop a marketing strategy and understand marketing performance, no evidence using a full set of teams for a long period of time currently exists. We propose that marketing performance can be estimated with a stochastic frontier model. Using twenty seasons of Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance data, we estimate the frontier attendance (i.e., the maximal attendance a team can reach) after controlling for factors unrelated to marketing, and we argue that the efficiency (i.e., the difference between the frontier and the actual attendance) represents the team's marketing performance. We also test whether our estimates capture marketing performance successfully by using the honeymoon and novelty effects, both of which are clearly shown in our estimates.