Kano Model

The Kano Model captures customer preferences and expectations related to product attributes or functions. It offers insight into which attributes of a product are valued by customers and in which way, to assist with prioritisation, product development and increasing customer satisfaction. It also useful to predict when investments in some product areas may not necessarily increase customer satisfaction, as it can provide guidelines on what kind of work is likely to result in significant improvements.

In the Kano model, there are five categories of product qualities or functions. They differ based on how customers would feel if certain aspects would be fulfilled or not fulfilled by a product.

The model is named after Noriaki Kano, who introduced it in 1980s, with the goal of challenging the established notion that any improvements to key product areas are likely to increase customer satisfaction. For his work, Kano received the Deming Prize for individuals.

Alternative names for Kano model categories

Kano’s original work was in Japanese, and has been translated into English by many authors using different terminology. Some of the alternative names for different categories are:

How to effectively make a Kano model?

It’s important to remember that the model tries to capture customer and user expectation, not the stakeholders or product manager’s view of those expectations. Do not try to fill in the categories yourself or by doing an internal research – go out and speak to your customers and users about that.

To facilitate the research, uncover customer preferences and categorise product aspects according to the Kano model, you can use a Kano Survey.

Kano Model Example

Using relatively generic customer expectations from mid-2020s, with abundant cheap cloud storage and professional consumers used to access content from multiple devices such as phones and laptops, an example of a Kano model categorisation for an note-taking application would be:

Using the Kano model to guide product development

A major benefit of using the model is to identify hidden basic functions and qualities (“must-be” in Kano’s terminology). A product lacking those functions may fail to even enter a market, without a clear understanding why that happened. Basic functions and qualities are thresholds the products need to achieve to even compete in a market. Such aspects need to be as good enough as in the competing products, but investing in further improvements beyond that would likely not produce any significant market improvements.

Performance functions and qualities are expected by customers and generally they reflect the key unique selling points or advantages of a product. Kano suggests that such attributes can often be found in the slogan of a company or a tag-line of a product. In general, the price a customer is willing to pay for a product is directly related to such performance attributes. In case of performance attributes, more is better, and customer satisfaction linearly increases with improvements.

Exciters are functions and aspects reflecting something that customers would value, but do not expect or know. They reflect the unknown needs, “awe effect” or “wow factor” in a product, and can bring significant competitive advantage. Assuming the basic needs are satisfied, investing in exciters can produce disproportionate increases in customer satisfaction.

Kano Model Limitations

The Kano model provides a snapshot of current customer expectations and the results are generally valid just in the short to medium term. An important aspect of the Kano model is that the classification of system attributes changes over time. What was once exciting becomes normal and expected. Exciters transition to performance attributes, and performance attributes transition to basic needs.

One important aspect that is not covered by the Kano model is when performance and exciter aspects surpass the ability of the market to notice or consume further improvements. At some point, more is no longer better, as the customers will not notice any significant change to their work. The QUPER model breakpoints can be used to complement Kano model analysis and establish when performance enhancements start to bring diminishing returns.

Learn more about the Kano Model

Related and complementary tools to the Kano Model

Alternatives to the Kano Model

Next article: Kano Survey