A Novel Hybrid MCDM Model to Select Celebrity Endorser for Airlines
Sen-Kuei Liao, Hsiao-Yin Hsu and Kuei-Lun Chang
Air travel service providers can guide customer perceptions by marketing campaigns with celebrity endorsement. This study employs hybrid multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques to select celebrity endorsers for international airlines in Taiwan. Firstly, the fuzzy Delphi method is applied to obtain the selection criteria from interviewed senior executives. In the second stage, the decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is used to find the causal relationships among the criteria within each perspective. Based on the result of DEMATEL, the analytic network process (ANP) is applied to obtain the respective weights of each. In order to avoid calculation and additional pairwise comparisons of ANP, the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) is used to rank the alternatives. An empirical case study is carried out for validation of the proposed model’s effectiveness. This study contributes to literature by extending a novel hybrid MCDM model in the endorser selection field.
Keywords: Airline, ANP, celebrity endorser, DEMATEL, fuzzy Delphi method, TOPSIS