A MCDM APPROACH FOR EVALUATION AND SELECTION OF DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS IN FMCG INDUSTRY

The purpose of this paper is to present a MCDM approach to address the problem of selecting distribution channels in marketing. In recent years, evaluating and selecting the right channels for the company has become a strategic issue in marketing, and how to select them is really a kind of multi-criteria decision making problem. In this paper, TOPSIS method is used to implement and select the appropriate distribution channel. In this method, two concepts of "ideal solution" and "similarity to ideal solution" are used and in order to measure the similarity of a design (or option) to an ideal and negative ideal solution, the distance of that design (or option) from the positive ideal and negative ideal solution is measured by giving an example. In order to collect data, we asked for cooperation of distribution experts in the industry as a participant and to weight the criteria, AHP technique was used.