Prioritization of Eastern-Azerbaijan PEGAH Company's Marketing Strategies: Using DEMATEL and VIKOR Methods

The dairy industry in Iran, for the proper use of production capacities and achieving a desirable position in a competitive environment, especially in the international arena, first requires the success of the domestic market using the right marketing methods. As a result, knowing the appropriate marketing strategies with respect to the company's situation can help further the growth of this industry. Marketing strategy is a tool for the organization to respond to competitive situations, and the existing frameworks in this field will help the company to effectively interact with the strategic sectors of the company and external factors. The marketing strategy can help create and develop knowledge and skills in the company, focus on customer needs, facilitate information and activity in a dynamic market environment. Due to the changing environment, having the appropriate strategy can help firms survive and gain competitive advantage; because the chosen strategy must also satisfy the needs of the target market, as well as comply with market and organizational objectives.
Material and Given that measures the quantity and quality as compliance with sanitary and environmental, risks, the economic - commercial, customer satisfaction, a competitive advantage, innovation and alignment with the market and align with internal process influence on appropriate marketing strategy and often are interdependent, it is a difficult, complex and cumbersome activity. In this research, by study of library resources, the most important criteria on the choice of appropriate marketing strategy to sell dairy products of Eastern Azerbaijan Pegah Company were identified. Due to the difficulties, using of tools that could be modeling network relationships could be useful. DEMATEL method is one of the known methods for determining network relationships between variables. So in this article a hybrid model based on Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), DEMATEL and VIKOR techniques have been proposed to prioritize marketing strategies. For this purpose, the weight of criteria is calculated by AHP method and using a pair wise comparison process. Then DEMATEL method according to the interdependence criteria, reform its weight importance. Finally, VIKOR method is used for prioritizing alternatives (strategies).
In the first stage of this research, with the assumption of the independence of the criteria, a AHP model was used to calculate the weights of the criteria. In the next stage, assuming the interdependence between the criteria, a hybrid method AHP-DEMATEL was used, and it was found that the final weight obtained both methods are almost identical, and the result is that the criteria of the model are not interdependent. In addition, based on the weights obtained for the criteria, the most important criteria were as follows: compliance with the health and environment, align with the internal process, risk, economic-commercial, having competitive advantage, innovation and alignment with the market, and customer satisfaction. The DEMATEL technique also concludes that Pegah should consider the competitive advantage criterion as the most important criterion in choosing its marketing strategy because it takes the most impact from other criteria and has the most impact on other criteria. In the last step, four considered strategies in the present study were ranked with VIKOR method and concluded that diversification and focus strategies are the first priority for the East Azerbaijan Pegah company. In addition, the integration strategy and defensive strategy respectively are the second and third priority.
The results of AHP model showed that compliance with the principles of health and environmental criteria is mainly criteria in the selection marketing strategy of the company. The results of DEMATEL techniques showed that the risk, economic - trade and innovation criteria and to align with market standards are cause criteria and among them, the criterion of "economic-commercial" has the greatest impact on other criteria. While compliance with the principles of environmental and health standards, customer satisfaction, competitive advantage and alignment with the company's internal process criteria are disabled. The results of VIKOR model also showed that diversity and focus strategies are first priority for the Pegah Azerbaijan Company. Then, the impact of each of the criteria obtained on four marketing strategy including the integration strategy, focus strategy, diversification strategy and defense strategy were reviewed and defensive strategy as the best marketing strategy for Eastern Azerbaijan Pegah Company was determined. And integration strategy, diversification strategy and focus strategy are the next priorities respectively. Be recommended that the Eastern Azerbaijan Pegah corporate executives instead of using plastic bags, bottles and plastic packaging, use bags that are biodegradable in the environment. The company directors also have a long-term plan to develop new products, and to understand the needs and demands of customers and their complaints and herds increase customer satisfaction.