A Fuzzy Group Decision Making Approach for Evaluating the Criteria in Consumer Behavior: a Case Study

Over the past two decades, consumer behavior study has become a very important subject for managers and practitioners in marketing management. There are some important criteria for evaluating the consumer behavior. In this study, the criteria which are important in the consumer behavior are taking into consideration and studied. Since the evaluation of criteria can be formulated by multicriteria decision making approach, in this paper we utilized Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). As there is uncertainty in the field of selection a fuzzy approach can be good choice, therefore to deal with this problem a Fuzzy AHP is applied. To achieve our purpose, firstly, a comprehensive overview from the existing literature is carried out to determine the criteria and finally 15 factors are identified and classified to four main groups to construct the hierarchy structure. In addition, for prioritizing and analyzing the mentioned criteria, an actual case in a well-known company in Iran is applied. The results of this study clearly demonstrated that the proposed framework of this study is very useful for top managers and policy makers in the organization.

Keywords:

Consumer behavior , Marketing Management Strategies , Multi criteria decision making , AHP , Fuzzy Sets Theory