Title: Prioritisation of factors influencing brand love of Indian young consumers using analytic hierarchy process

Authors: Smriti Pande; Kriti Priya Gupta

Addresses: Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India ' Symbiosis Centre for Management Studies (SCMS), Noida, Constituent of Symbiosis International (Deemed University), Pune, India

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to prioritise the factors that are considered to be important when making the decision towards liking or loving a particular apparel brand, from the perspective of young consumers. The study models the problem of identifying various factors influencing brand love (BL) as a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem and applies analytic hierarchy process (AHP) as a tool to find the relative weights of the factors. Then these weights are used to evaluate three popular apparel brands amongst youngsters, namely 'ZARA', 'Hennes & Mauritz' (H&M) and 'Marks & Spencer' (M&S). The data pertaining to pairwise comparisons of various factors and sub-factors related to the study are collected from the students studying at various colleges in Delhi-National Capital Region (NCR) (India) using convenience sampling. The results indicate that brand experience is the most important factor for young consumers amongst all 12 factors considered in the study.

Keywords: brand love; analytic hierarchy process; AHP; multiple-criteria decision making; MCDM; prioritisation; Indian youth.

DOI: 10.1504/IJICBM.2020.110463

International Journal of Indian Culture and Business Management, 2020 Vol.21 No.3, pp.279 - 302

Received: 12 Apr 2019
Accepted: 10 Jun 2019
Published online: 20 Oct 2020 *

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