The value of the Kano model

Suppose you're a car manufacturer who has built a car that goes from 0 to 100 kmph in six seconds. Your car attracts a lot of customers, and they are very happy with your car.

Your competitor invests heavily in R&D to build a car that goes to 100 in five seconds. Despite the big marketing efforts, their car does not attract many buyers.

Like many companies, your competitor believes customer satisfaction is proportional to performance. Indeed, some customers will only want the fastest car available. But to other customers, the difference between five or six seconds is negligible. For them, the car is fast enough.

How we feel about a car is more important than how a car feels. (Levitt, 1986)

How customers feel about performance determines their satisfaction, or how satisfied they imagine they'll be once they use your product. This subjective perception must inform decisions about the features of any product you build. After all, why invest in the performance of a feature if your target customers don't care?

If you want to make decisions based on how customers feel about your product, the Kano model is for you. It is a tool that helps you prioritise your product development by how its features impact customer satisfaction.

What to use the Kano model for

The Kano model is mature, popular and easy to apply. Doing a Kano study takes as much time and effort as you are willing to put into it. Even with little effort, the results are always valuable.

You can do a Kano study for any type of product or service. It’s been used on projects ranging from deciding what features to include in an Android app (Putra, 2021) to the complete redesign of an airline service (Gustafsson, 1999) and even improving NASA science programs (Lee & Newcomb, 1997).

Although I'll be using the word “product” more than “service” in this guide, the method is very suitable for services. In fact, the majority of international academically published studies have been conducted within a service context (Löfgren, 2008).

Services and products have attributes that define them. Users of these products and services have an attitude towards these attributes. Whether you even want to or not, you have a certain feeling (even if it’s indifference) about the fact that the car you’re looking at is blue. And you’ll also have a feeling about the way the car dealership is handling the sales process. All processes, services and products can be subject to a Kano study.

Zoom levels

“Features” and “properties” are very broad terms, and that’s intentionally so. You can use the Kano model for all levels of a product or service, from the micro to the macro. The method has proven its worth in detailed as well as broad contexts.

Say you’re a car manufacturer. You can use the Kano method to understand how your customers feel about very general properties of a new car you’re designing, such as mileage, fuel consumption or trunk space.

The Kano model is equally useful to find out customer attitudes of very detailed features, such as the specifics of the car’s infotainment system. You’ll want to know how people feel about the fact that it’s voice controlled, that it can play movies while you’re driving or that its internet connection is free. And when you start developing the voice control system, the Kano method can again help you gauge customer preferences about that very specific aspect. You’ll want to know how your customers would feel about the car’s ability to recognize different voices, the languages it can understand or what voice it uses to talk to the driver.

The same applies to the properties of a service. You can use the Kano model to learn about customer attitudes towards very broad aspects of an airline service: the continents customers can fly to, the amount of flights in a day or the size of the airline’s carbon footprint. But you can also use it to unearth customer preferences of for example the in-flight meals and find out whether airline customers think it is mandatory to have crunchy crackers together with their cheese. (It turns out they do).

The value of the Kano model

Because the outcome of the Kano method are numbers, you can determine which features are of more value than others to your customers. In other words, you can rank features by perceived customer value.

As one practitioner (Berger, 1993) puts it:

Design is a trade-off activity. Any credible insight the designer can develop with respect to which customer requirements can or cannot be sacrificed is invaluable for keeping development effort focused, making necessary trade-offs, and maximizing customer benefit.

If you are working in product development, the Kano method helps you:

• Prioritise your product roadmap;

• Identify areas of improvement;

• Decide what features to remove;

• Segment your customer base based on their preferences towards product features and

• Innovate.

From a managerial perspective, the output of a Kano study helps make the right decisions:

• You'll be allocating effort to the features that matter most. You'll stay ahead of competitors who keep pouring resources into product features that do not make their customers happier;

• The efficiency of your team is increased and your team is better aligned. You’ll no longer have to make decisions based on assumptions or whoever has the loudest voice;

• It takes you, your team and your management away from a product-centric mindset to a customer-centric one;

• You'll be able to segment your customers based on their satisfaction: are you building a car for race-car drivers, or for people who just like cars that feel fast? This helps you set the focus for the marketing of your product.