Prioritizing Target Market Attractiveness in Commercial Banking by Conjoint Analysis: The Case of Mellat Bank

Targeting is one the important steps of marketing strategic planning. Targeting, requires the researchers and marketers ability in prioritizing target markets. Analyzing attractiveness of potential markets, requires using market attractiveness criteria. There are many criteria that can be used by businesses to analyzing potential target markets (depending on internal/and external factors that affect the organization). The aim of this research is identifying and prioritizing market attractiveness criteria used by Iranian commercial banks. Then, research procedure includes 3 stages:First, extracting the market attractiveness criteria from the literature.Second, identifying the most applicable criteria using the banking and expert opinion.Third, prioritizing these criteria using 43 gathered questionnaire from banking experts and also conjoint analysis. The results of this analysis revealed that there are 6 market attractiveness criteria that can be sorted by importance as: competitive intensity, potential profitability, market size, technological factors, market growth and customer fit.