A new integrated fuzzy QFD approach for market segments evaluation and selection

Market segment selection and evaluation are critical marketing activities of all companies. To evaluate and select appropriate market segments, several decision makers and criteria must be involved in the decision process. This study proposes a new integrated fuzzy quality function deployment (QFD) to support the market segment selection and evaluation process. The proposed approach identifies the features that the market segments should have ("WHATs"), in order to fit with the company's business strengths ("HOWs"). In the proposed approach, the relative importance of the "WHATs", the "HOWs"-"WHATs" correlation scores, the resulting weights of the "HOWs", and the impact of each potential market segment, are assessed in linguistic values. The functions of the averaged ratings and averaged weights are then defined, and fuzzy TOPSIS is used to obtain the final ranking of alternatives. The computational procedure of the proposed approach is further illustrated through a case study. Finally, this paper compares the proposed approach with another fuzzy QFD approach, demonstrating the advantages of the proposed approach. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.