Employing fuzzy ANP for ranking the personality of international brands in the sports shoe industry

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to provide a quantitative basis to analytically determine the ranking of the brand personality of Adidas, Asics, Nike, Puma and Saucony brands among Iranian customers via a conventional multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method.

Design/methodology/approach

Data for determining the importance of evaluation criteria and ranking of brands are gathered by means of distributing questionnaires among a group of Iranian customers of sport shoes, as well as some industrial experts. The fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) was used to rank the brands with regard to dependencies between criteria and alternatives.

Findings

The results indicate that FANP is a capable method which provides invaluable insights for strategic marketing decisions in the sport product industry. Results show Adidas has the best performance in the sports shoe market compared to the other four brands. In this study, it was found that expertise sophistication was the most important criterion among Aaker’s five main criteria.

Originality/value

The value of this paper is applying FANP decision-making method for ranking sport shoe brands. This method has not been commonly used in the area of marketing, hence it is added to the pool of techniques used in ranking brands. In addition, evaluation and ranking of brands can be very useful for both academic research and practice. Researchers can benchmark the competences of each brand through evaluating them, and industrialists can extract the competitive advantages of the selected brands.

Citation

Khazaei Pool, J., Arabzad, S.M., Asian, S., Fahimi, M. and Verij Kazemi, R. (2018), "Employing fuzzy ANP for ranking the personality of international brands in the sports shoe industry", Journal of Modelling in Management, Vol. 13 No. 1, pp. 137-155. https://doi.org/10.1108/JM2-02-2016-0009