Comparing TOPSIS and VIKOR to prioritize international communication interventions across digital platforms

Digital platforms have become primary arenas for international and intercultural communication. Yet practitioners still lack a transparent way to prioritize competing interventions when goals such as reach, authenticity, trust, and safety conflict. This study develops and tests a multi-criteria decision framework that compares the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) and the VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR). These two methods were selected because they represent complementary decision logics widely used in multi-criteria decision analysis: TOPSIS ranks alternatives according to their geometric distance from an ideal solution, while VIKOR identifies compromise solutions that minimize the maximum regret among competing criteria. Employing both methods enables the study to capture different trade-off perspectives that arise in international communication planning, thereby improving the transparency and interpretability of intervention prioritization. Using China-anchored outbound communication towards ASEAN, EU, and MENA audiences as illustrative contexts, we construct a criteria system that integrates validated intercultural outcomes (e.g., openness, empathy, interaction management, perceived authenticity) with operational and platform-related factors (e.g., algorithmic visibility, translation and subtitling quality, accessibility, moderation and civility, and cost). A multidisciplinary expert panel (N = 100) provides importance weights and performance assessments for a portfolio of interventions, including localization depth, creator partnerships, cross-platform sequencing, and community moderation design. From these data, we build cleaned, normalized decision matrices and apply TOPSIS (closeness to an ideal solution) and VIKOR (compromise under conflicting criteria), followed by unified robustness and sensitivity analyses. Across contexts, both methods converge on a similar top tier of interventions: strategies that combine deep localization, sustained partnerships with credible creators, and proactive community moderation consistently outperform cost or speed-optimized options. Method divergences are confined to mid-ranked alternatives and align with theoretical differences between ideal-distance and regret-minimizing logics. The findings demonstrate that a dual TOPSIS–VIKOR lens can provide defensible, practice-ready rankings and diagnostics for international communication planning, and the study offers a replicable workflow that other institutions can adapt to their own platforms, audiences, and strategic priorities.