The Strategic Management of Market Share and the Effects of Iran’s Cultural Factors on the Aspects of Brand Equity, Using a Fuzzy Approach (A case study of Philpa System Co)

In today's competitive markets, brand is not just an efficient tool in the hands of managers. It is a strategic imperative that helps organizations to create more value for customers and create sustainable competitive advantages as well. From a customer perspective, brand is an identity source for the product, creating legal responsibility for the manufacturer and binding the customer to the manufacturer. Since office furniture in Iran is considered as a semi-luxurious product and customers buy such products merely depending upon their perception and expectation of decorating and equipping office environment and their social and vocational position, recently various designs and products have entered Iran’s industry of office furniture; thus, we decided to investigate the relationship between Iranian cultural factors with those creating brand value in this industry. We chose Philpa System Co. as our statistical population and the subject for our case study. 99 persons out of the people who bought from Philpa System at least one time were chosen as samples and author-made questionnaires were distributed among them, the validity of which was confirmed through depth interviews made with experts of the pertinent industry and its reliability was also calculated using Cronbach's alpha test and was shown to be 4628 %, which indicated the good reliability of these questionnaires. The data obtained from these questionnaires were analyzed using path analysis and Amos software in the fuzzy environment. The results showed that different aspects of Iranian cultural factors, specifically the variables of the quality of customers’ perception from the brand and brand awareness with standardized coefficients 4118and 9318, respectively, had the greatest effect on brand equity variable. So in making decisions related to brand equity, the role of these two variables can be important

Keywords:

Brand , Brand Equity , AMOS , Brand Strategic Management , Iranian cultural factors , Philpa System Co