Optimal marketing strategy: A decision-making with ANP and TOPSIS

The purpose of the current study is to model the marketing strategy decision-making problem as a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem and provide a five-step decision support framework to make and carefully assess the marketing strategies. A marketing strategy decision-making framework is essential for marketing strategists to determine the most appropriate marketing strategy in an efficient manner. The contribution of the current study lies in the practical implementation of the integration of the analytic network process (ANP) and technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS), which can be utilized by marketing strategists in a real industry to determine the appropriate marketing strategy. In addition, the results provide guidance to private hotel managers on marketing strategies that can help them to obtain a competitive advantage by evaluating their specific and limited marketing resources. The proposed framework can be easily understood and followed by marketing strategists to determine the appropriate marketing strategy. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.