**1. Introduction**

Brand experience and brand attachment are two important factors in the relationship between consumers and brands. Many studies have already explained the importance of brand experience, indicating that brand experience affects consumer loyalty and satisfaction [1–3]. Kang et al. [4] also maintained that, in addition to increasing the value of products and services, the consumer experience created by enterprises will become more substantial.

However, the idea of measuring consumer brand attachment has not received much attention. Despite increased customer-oriented marketing efforts in the service industry, relatively little attention has been given to the processes between brand attachment and brand experience. Although the general methodology or technology has focused on measuring customer perceptions of service quality and satisfaction [2,5], few studies have analyzed brand attachment for specific guidelines on how to design services of brand experience to meet the quality standards expected by consumers.

Although brand has the characteristic of material, it is also an important marketing tool for creating consumers' experiences [6]. However, consumers cannot build profound and meaningful relationships with enterprises only through brand experience [7]. They seem to lack an emotional attachment to brand [8], and they use their attachment to brand

**Citation:** Hsu, T.-H.; Lin, L.-Z. A Multidimensional Fuzzy Quality Function Deployment Design for Brand Experience Assessment of Convenience Stores. *Mathematics* **2021**, *9*, 2565. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/math9202565

Academic Editors: Jorge de Andres Sanchez and Laura González-Vila Puchades

Received: 25 August 2021 Accepted: 8 October 2021 Published: 13 October 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

to show their personalities, characteristics [9], and social self-identities [10]. Therefore, we believe that through the special attachment consumers hold for a brand, the brand can arouse certain types of experiences for consumers, who can also gain satisfaction. There are other ways for brands to attract consumers' attention rather than only brand experience. In other words, in the retail or service industry, brand attachment (such as sense, emotion, self-connection, captivation, or social identity) can act as a connection and a conversation between consumers and brand experience.

In the light of this, Das et al. [11], Tafesse [12], and Schmitt [13] all believe that business strategies should be adjusted toward advantageous brand experience delivery. They think that there are already many companies that successfully manage their performance of organization through brand experience. They can also hold exiting consumers with product quality, market share, and profit rate. Therefore, we believe that the message sent by these issues does not simply emphasize that enterprises should use "brand experience" as the basis of competing advantages. Enterprises should further elevate and discover how to create brand experience and make consumers form an authentic value of brand attachment. Hence, the purpose of this study is to probe the meaning of brand experience activities. Apart from delivering brand messages, it is more important to listen to consumers' most genuine voices at the scene. Through the conversation between consumer and brand, enterprises can find the core of attachment that consumers care about the most and create a greater actual benefit of brand experience activities.

The originality of this study was that we used the process of quality function deployment (QFD) for enterprises to truly hear every voice of the brand attachment demand attribute and further acknowledged the brand attachment demand and value treasured by consumers. In other words, through the planning and design of products or services, along with the execution of the managemen<sup>t</sup> process, enterprises can further understand the consumer's cognitive feel of brand attachment. By using the multiple procedures of QFD, the consumer's genuine demand in their mind can be expressed by the internal relational structure matrix.

Hence, this study tried to integrate the procedure designs of QFD and fuzzy linguistic preference relations (FLPR) into fuzzy quality function deployment (FQFD). By doing so, we try to understand the brand attachment that consumers long for and the value that consumers demand and hence turn them into a major reference for brand experience strategy planning. The expected results and specific highlights of this study included the following: (1) establishment of a hierarchy of brand attachment through a literature review and discussion with experts; (2) construction of a QFD framework of brand attachment and a brand experience managemen<sup>t</sup> strategy, as well as a correlation analysis between these two components; and (3) execution of a performance evaluation of different convenience stores based on the perceived difference between the desired performance and the current performance of brand experience strategy management.

The paper is organized as follows. A relevant literature review is provided in Section 2. Section 3 presents the construction of the brand attachment FQFD analysis process. The research design and empirical study are presented and discussed in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. Finally, Section 6 provides the conclusion and implications.
