Effective marketing of a closed-loop supply chain network: a fuzzy QFD approach

Both consumer and government concerns for the environment are driving many original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to engage in additional series of activities stemming from the reverse supply chain. The combination of forward/traditional supply chain and reverse supply chain forms the closed-loop supply chain. Apart from its efficient design, the success of a closed-loop supply chain network depends on its marketing strategy as well. Hence, it is important that the planned marketing strategy be evaluated with respect to the drivers of public participation in the network. To this end, we identify the important drivers of public participation and propose a fuzzy Quality Function Deployment based methodology and method of total preferences to evaluate the marketing strategy of a closed-loop supply chain with respect to those drivers. A numerical example is considered to illustrate the methodology.