استفاده از ANP فازی برای رنکینگ شخصیت برند های بین المللی در صنعت کفش ورزشی Employing fuzzy ANP for ranking the personality of international brands in the sports shoe industry

1. Introduction Industrial companies are continually looking to improve their business turnover and improve practices to achieve this objective. Vincent et al. (2013) analyzed overall performance models to allow the decision-makers to select potential actions to launch, regarding given decision criteria. The Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approaches have been developed to deal with problems such as ranking, sorting and quantification. Gurumurthy and Kodali (2012) identified the different attributes that are to be considered when making the decision to select a suitable product development methodology. For the selection of such a methodology, especially for making a strategic decision within the product design and development department of an organization, the most commonly used MCDM model is the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). Goyal et al. (2015) identified and prioritized corporate sustainability practices to improve the corporate sustainability performance in the manufacturing sector. Further, these practices were being prioritized to discover the essential practices to ensure logical allocation of limited resources. Then, AHP was used to assess the identified practices of corporate sustainability and to find their priorities for improvement of corporate sustainability performance. Globalization has opened up new opportunities and challenges for companies and brands (Alden et al., 1999). In the past, globalization of a product was a sign of its quality and the success of the company that produced it. Nowadays, products are often globally available irrespective of their reception and quality, and customers have a chance to assess and compare the quality of products from local and international producers. In this process, a local brand may have a chance to fulfill the requirements of the customers and win their satisfaction, while a well-established global brand may fail to do so (Milberg and Sinn, 2008). Globalization exposes customers in most countries to many foreign and local brands. Increasing competition has occurred between local and foreign brands not only in developed countries (e.g. Japan) but also in countries with newly industrialized economies (e.g. Korea and Mexico), as well as developing countries such as Iran. In this mass market, retail talent is considered a valuable resource in branding a product, and the service quality presented by retailers will add to a brand’s reputation. It is possible for companies to place themselves in the mass market by providing interactions with important customers who develop a brand’s values and advantages. A new trend in marketing science focuses on marketing activities in order to attract the attention and reception of local customers, and to be remembered as a quality product by them. Different studies show that the perception of potential customers of the value of a product is largely independent of its real value, i.e., the quality of the product or the services provided to the customers, rather, it relies primarily on success in branding and marketing activities (Kapferer, 2008; Keller, 2008; Kim et al., 2015).