Enhancing Coffee Marketing Strategies through Multi-Criteria Decision-Making

Coffee is a globally preferred beverage, and Indonesia, as a major supplier, provides a wide variety of high-quality coffee varieties with unique characteristics from each region. East Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, produces Colol coffee, a high-quality variety with unexplored market potential. The marketing of Colol coffee faces significant challenges, including limited accessibility, lack of market information, and inadequate logistics infrastructure. A comprehensive marketing strategy necessitates the consideration of numerous criteria, which generate a range of alternative decisions to identify the marketing area. This study proposes a framework to optimize the marketing strategy of Colol coffee using the MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision-making) approach, which integrates AHP, SMARTER, and TOPSIS methods. This framework is applied to rank marketing areas in 38 provinces in Indonesia based on five criteria, namely, accessibility, market potential, logistics, environmental conditions, and safety. The results show that the MCDM method can increase the effectiveness of marketing strategies. The top three alternative coffee marketing regions are Papua, East Kalimantan, and South Papua, with eigenvalues of 0.0569, 0.0424, and 0.0421. With incomplete data, in some marketing areas, it is a challenge to integrate multiple MCDM methods to have a better ranking that represents the real world of marketing strategy. This study supports the enhancement of the digital economy in the agricultural sector. It provides a meaningful understanding of the application of MCDM in marketing agricultural products, with far-reaching implications for marketing strategies in similar sectors.