Developing e-store marketing strategies to satisfy customers' needs using a new hybrid gray relational model

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of online shopping services, e-stores are experiencing ever more fierce competition. Thus, it is imperative that managers take steps to improve their services and ensure customer loyalty, and this can only be done by understanding their customers' needs and developing appropriate marketing strategies. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to propose a new hybrid gray relational model to enhance strategies by adopting innovation and creativity to achieve the aspiration level in each dimension/criterion of satisfying/promoting human life and convenient service. This new hybrid gray relational model, which can improve the performance of each criteria to close the aspiration level of each reference point, will address interdependent problems among dimensions/criteria in the real world and provide feedback. More specifically, a DANP (DEMATEL-based ANP) and a gray relational assessment model will be combined to produce an influential network relationship map (INRM), showing the influential weights and gaps between the actual performance and the level of aspiration. As such, the contribution made by this research will be to produce the best strategies for e-store managers to improve their business model in order to meet customers' needs, encourage them to repurchase, and to enable stores to provide the most effective and efficient service for their customers.