Criteria evaluation for pricing decisions in strategic marketing management using an intuitionistic cognitive map approach

Marketing decisions are challenging in profit-oriented companies because of their complex nature. Many factors influence the marketing strategy in the new product development (NPD) process. With this aspect, strategic marketing decisions for launching a product to the market can be observed as multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems. This study proposes a novel approach called intuitionistic cognitive map (ICM), for assessing the criteria that influence the pricing strategy of a company in earlier stages of the product's life cycle in the market. A framework is formed based on a profound analysis of literature and experts' opinions, in terms of criteria affecting pricing strategy and the causal relationships between them. Intuitionistic fuzzy sets and cognitive mapping are used together to capture the hesitation of the decision makers caused by lack of information and to define cause-and-effect relations between the criteria to represent the complexity of strategic marketing decisions. Contrary to conventional MCDM methods that require complete data, ICM method is able to deal with lack of information and hesitancy of the decision makers. In addition, ICM method has a new feature called "the coefficient of synergy" incorporating the synergy effect of the application field in the model. The case study is conducted in a technological-device-manufacturing company. Seventeen factors that influence the company's pricing decisions are determined and evaluated with three marketing experts, and in the numerical application, brand image, market share, consumer fidelity, market/segment size, and new product capability criteria had the maximum positive influence on pricing decisions.