<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p>Intense competition in today’s markets has meant that customer loyalty is no longer as strong as it used to be. In this context, many researchers have aimed to add new values to the concept of loyalty, particularly focusing on the concept of “love”. This study explores customers’ feelings towards location in order to identify their preferred - or “most loved” - food and beverage locations. A questionnaire was administered to 395 adult customers living in the city centre of Erzurum, Turkey. The fuzzy Shannon’s entropy method is used to identify the weights of each criterion of love, while the fuzzy VIKOR method is used to rank alternative locations. As a result of the analyses, the most prominent expression was found as “I love this location!”, and customers’ most loved places were identified as those serving regional dishes in Erzurum Province, Turkey. The study uses fuzzy numbers to rank alternatives according to the criteria of love. In addition, the ranking is based on degrees of fuzziness by changing the α-cut levels of the fuzzy numbers. The study examines how customers’ preferences between alternatives alter via this change</p></abstract>

Intense competition in today’s markets has meant that customer loyalty is no longer as strong as it used to be. In this context, many researchers have aimed to add new values to the concept of loyalty, particularly focusing on the concept of “love”. This study explores customers’ feelings towards location in order to identify their preferred - or “most loved” - food and beverage locations. A questionnaire was administered to 395 adult customers living in the city centre of Erzurum, Turkey. The fuzzy Shannon’s entropy method is used to identify the weights of each criterion of love, while the fuzzy VIKOR method is used to rank alternative locations. As a result of the analyses, the most prominent expression was found as “I love this location!”, and customers’ most loved places were identified as those serving regional dishes in Erzurum Province, Turkey. The study uses fuzzy numbers to rank alternatives according to the criteria of love. In addition, the ranking is based on degrees of fuzziness by changing the α-cut levels of the fuzzy numbers. The study examines how customers’ preferences between alternatives alter via this change

Customer love: Research on the ranking of food and beverage locations

Management & Marketing

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"Customer love: Research on the ranking of food and beverage locations"}

Intense competition in today’s markets has meant that customer loyalty is no longer as strong as it used to be. In this context, many researchers have aimed to...

Customer love: Research on the ranking of food and beverage locations

Published Online: Sep 01, 2015

Page range: 103 - 117

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/mmcks-2015-0009

© 2015

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.