Kano Taxonomy of Customer Needs

While doing some reading on Kano Analysis, and I came across a really nice breakdown of the model's different kinds of customer needs.

If you're not familiar with it--and I wasn't--the Kano model groups product features by how they meet customer expectations (e.g., four-wheel drive in a car, or local search on a website). In particular, Kano looks at the relationship between how complete a feature is and how satisfied the customer is by it.

The text below is taken from Managing a Dispersed Product Development Process (PDF, 61 pages), Chapter 26 of the Handbook of Marketing. (I re-created the graphs and added the annotations.) I found this really useful for planning and priotizing features for a website project I'm working on.

Must Haves

"Some features address 'must have' needs. Such needs are usually met by current technology and any new product must satisfy these needs. However, it is difficult to differentiate a product by increasing the satisfaction of these needs because they are already satisfied well by the competitive set of existing products."

More the Better

"Other needs are 'more the better' (sometimes called linear satisfiers). When new technology or improved ideas increase the amount by which these needs are satisfied, customer satisfaction increases , but usually with diminishing returns." In the car world, the classic example of this is gas mileage.

Delighters

"Finally, a special class of needs are those of which customers have difficulty articulating or rarely expect to have fulfilled. When features are included in a product to satisfy such customer needs, often unexpectedly, customers experience "delight!" Sources of customer delight can become strong motivators for initial purchase and for customer satisfaction after the sale. Examples include complementary fruit baskets in hotel rooms, software that anticipates your next move, automobiles that rarely need service"

A Dynamic Model

"It is important to remember that the Kano model is dynamic. Today's "delighter" features become tomorrow's "must have" features. For example, a graphical user interface (GUI) and multi-processing were once "delighter" features, but today they are "must have" features for any desktop computer operating system. However, the basic underlying customer needs of an effective and easy to use operating system remain."

More on Kano Analysis

For a complete introduction to Kano analysis, including instructions on creating your own Kano survey, see the Center for Quality Management's special issue on Kano Methods (PDF, 37 pages).