kano-model-critique

**

Critique of the Kano model

Grapentine, T. 2015. Why the Kano model wears no clothes. Quirks Marketing Research Media 34

MacDonald, Erin, et al. "The Kano method’s imperfections, and implications in product decision theory." Proceedings of the 2006 International Design Research Symposium. Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers, Seoul, Korea, 2006.

Mikulić, Josip, and Darko Prebežac. "The Kano model in tourism research: a critical note." Annals of Tourism Research 61 (2016): 25-27.

Mikulić, Josip, and Darko Prebežac. "A critical review of techniques for classifying quality attributes in the Kano model." Managing Service Quality: An International Journal (2011).

**

In his critique on the Kano model, Grapentine (2015) writes

Kano [...] classifies in the attractive evaluation category a respondent who selected “like” for “TV picture forms quickly” and then selects “must-be” for “TV picture forms slowly”, which makes no sense because this pair of answers is absurd.

The unfortunate propagation of “must-be” as the second possible answer lies at the heart of this critique. As mentioned earlier, “must-be” (or its alternative “expect”) is in fact a sloppy translation of the original Japanese term “atarimae” (Horton & Goers, 2019). What is translated as “must-be” should in fact mean that something is considered “commonplace and therefore expected and unremarkable”.

Also, considering TV sets weren’t as snappy in the eighties, the fact that a TV picture forms slowly could very well be an atarimae attribute of any TV: people considered it default behaviour.

Considering the erroneous translation into “must-be” and the technological context of the time, Grapentine’s critique does not hold.