The allure of ‘delight qualities’

If you were to ask which single business concept deserves to be more widely known, I would be hard-pressed to find a better answer than the Kano model. Developed in the 1980s by Dr Noriaki Kano at the Tokyo University of Science, it is not only self-evidently true, it also provides a simple framework to explain much that is wrong with modern life.

Kano is a management theorist, but his greatest contribution is in seeking to reduce the wasted effort and expense which arise when an organisation’s pursuit of seemingly logical targets becomes misaligned with other crucial qualities which deliver emotional value to customers.

He spotted that the expensive ‘improvement’ of many product features would not necessarily translate into commensurate gains in customer satisfaction. Moreover those enhancements which often generated the most customer happiness – ‘delight attributes’ – often appeared to be surprisingly tangential to the main job the product was designed to do.

Kano divided the various attributes of a service or product into five categories:

Indifferent qualities. For instance it might require superhuman technological effort to extend a mobile phone’s battery life from 20 hours to 26 but, given most people’s daily habits, few would much care.

Must-have properties. If your retail website is achingly slow, say, nothing else matters. A supermarket chain once introduced an own-brand Pot Noodle, but omitted the flavour sachet to cut costs, failing to spot that a Pot Noodle without the sachet is like a Bloody Mary without Worcestershire sauce – i.e. slightly tragic.

One-dimensional attributes. These generally are quite close to the core function of a product and tend to be the focus of the metrics companies measure most intently.