Integrating Digital Technology Into Marathon Race With a Technology-Driven Service Design Approach to Enhance Marathoner Experiences

Abstract

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology rapidly integrates into daily life, offering advantages in sports, including personal performance tracking, athlete-fan communication via social media, and virtual event organization. However, its comprehensive use in marathons to enhance marathoner experience remains underexplored. This study presented a technology-driven marathon service process, guiding digital technology applications across prerace communication, marathon registration, race entertainment, medical service, and postrace engagement. A mixed-method approach, utilizing the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), informed technology selection for each service dimension under expert judgment. Three groups of experts, including World Athletics marathon organizers, elite runners, and marathon medical team members, were invited for triangulated discussion, validated, and confirmed the technology selection. The results revealed the decision-making for incorporating digital technology into each marathon service process. In the realm of prerace communication, interactive content and content management were appropriated for addressing awareness, motivation, trust, and engagement. In terms of marathon registration, experts agreed that application programming interfaces (APIs) can streamline procedures for runner convenience. For race entertainment, extended reality (XR) excels can stimulate runner motivation through realistic competition simulations. Regarding medical service, digital health records emerged as a vital tool for medical operations during the marathons. Lastly, elite runners had shown a compassionate inclination towards affiliation e-rewards, enabling them to convert their achievements into tangible benefits. A service blueprint was constructed to visualize the integration of digital technologies into marathon events covering marathoner actions, front-of-house employee actions, back-of-house employee actions, and internal information technology systems. These findings offer valuable insights to marathon organizers, enhancing marathoner experiences, and service quality through digital technology that becomes more prevalent.