Deriving consensus rankings via
multicriteria decision making methodology
Amy Poh Ai Ling, Mohamad Nasir Saludin and Masao Mukaidono
1. Introduction
With increasing globalization, local retailers find themselves having to compete with large
foreign players who target niche markets. To excel as a market leader in the global economy,
organizations must strive to optimize their marketing strategies through benchmarking and
quality measures.
Ranking and selecting projects is a relatively common, yet often difficult task. It is
complicated because there is usually more than one dimension for measuring the impact of
each criteria and more than one decision maker. This paper considers a real application of
project selection for the marketing mix element, using an approach called ELECTRE.
The ELECTRE method has several unique features not found in other solution methods;
these are the concepts of outranking, indifference and preference thresholds. The ELECTRE
method applied to the project selection problem utilizes the Statistical Package for the Social
Sciences (SPSS) software.
Our contribution is to show the potential of a marketing mix model in deriving a consensus
ranking for benchmarking. According to the feedback from the respondents, we were able to
determine that the best element is benchmarking due to the high rating.
The decision problem faced by management has been translated into our market research
problem in the form of questions that define the information that is required to make the
decision and how this information is obtained. The corresponding research problem is to
assess whether the market would accept the consensus rankings derived from the
benchmarking result from the impact of marketing mix on customer satisfaction using a
multi-criteria decision making outranking methodology.
2. Literature review
The project ranking problem is, like many decision problems, challenging for at least two
reasons. First, there is no single criterion in the marketing mix model that adequately
captures the effect or impact of each element; in other words, it is a multiple-criteria problem.
Second, there is no single decision maker; instead, the project ranking requires a consensus
from a group of decision makers (Henig and Buchanan, 1996).
Buchanan et al. (1998) have debated that effective decisions come from effective
decision-making processes and proposed that the subjective and objective parts of the
decision-making process should be divided. The relationship between the alternatives and
the criteria is portrayed using attributes, which are the objective and measurable character
of alternatives. Attributes form the bridge within the alternatives and the criteria. Often,
marketing management is primarily concerned with solutions rather than outlining the
criteria.
DOI 10.1108/17515631211194571 VOL. 13 NO. 1 2012, pp. 3-12, Q Emerald Group Publishing Limited, ISSN 1751-5637
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BUSINESS STRATEGY SERIES
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Amy Poh Ai Ling is based at
the Graduate School of
Science and Technology,
Meiji University, Kawasaki,
Japan.
Mohamad Nasir Saludin is
based at the Faculty of
Management & Defence
Study, National Defence
University of Malaysia,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Masao Mukaidono is based
at the Graduate School of
Science and Technology,
Meiji University, Kawasaki,
Japan.
The authors are deeply
indebted to the National
University of Malaysia for
making this project a success.
The authors would like to
express gratitude to GCOE
Meiji University for providing
significant support, and the
research assistants Chen,
Leong, Tan and Wong: much of
this work and data collection
was done in conjunction with
them.