An Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process (IFAHP) approach in solving the marketing platform selection problem / Nor Faradilah Mahad

Nowadays, digital marketing is becoming a more popular marketing strategy since it can reach a wider audience, be cost-effective, and engage customers with the brand efficiently. Technology advancement may be the factor that contributes to businesses choosing to shift their marketing strategies from traditional to digital marketing. There are many social media platforms available to market a brand online. Each of these platforms has its advantages and functionality that will affect the business’s growth. The process of selecting these platforms to satisfy the decisionmakers (DMs) preferences can be challenging since multiple conflicting criteria may involve in the evaluation process.
The Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MDCM) method is recommended to solve the problem. One of the most popular MCDM methods is Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) method. However, this method is often criticised for failing to appropriately address the inherent uncertainty and vagueness of human judgments despite its popularity and simplicity (Xu and Liao, 2013). The Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process (FAHP) method is then proposed to overcome the weaknesses of the AHP method. The Fuzzy set (FS) theory introduced by Zadeh (1965) is integrated into the AHP method to develop the FAHP method. The Intuitionistic fuzzy set is then introduced by Atanassov (1986) as the extension to the FS theory. The IFS theory is characterised by a membership function, a non-membership function, and a hesitation function. The IFS theory is integrated into the AHP method to develop the Intuitionistic Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchical Process (IFAHP) method. This method not only improved the objectivity of expert judgment but also reflected the hesitant information of DMs when they make judgments on the evaluation objects (Xu et al., 2020) moreover when the DMs cannot express their preference for an alternative easily. The IFAHP method may effectively solve the subjectivity of expert decision-making in the evaluation process since the hesitancy degree can explain experts’ hesitation (Li, 2021).