A critical review of Kano's wording and its impact on attribute classification: a case study of smartphone in Korea

摘要

As the popularity of Kano's model grows, Kano's wording, which plays a pivotal role for the categorisation of quality attributes, has been criticised for being ambiguous, cumbersome, and indefinite. Many scholars have modified the wording; however, its impact has rarely been explored in detail. This paper identifies the intrinsic and extrinsic problems of Kano's wording through an extensive literature review and proposes a new way to ask using better-worse (B-W) questions and a five-point ordinal scale as alternative answers. To examine how the B-W approach works in comparison with the Kano model, the author conducted a case study of smartphones. The application results of the proposed method are different from that of the Kano model: 'attractive' and 'must-be' attributes, which postulate unidirectional effects on customer satisfaction in the Kano model, do not appear. Instead, 'attractive tendency' attribute and 'must-be tendency' attribute are found in the B-W method. A frequency test using the evaluation table is performed to understand this phenomenon, and differences and similarities of the two approaches are discussed in this paper. A quantified potential satisfaction index and potential dissatisfaction index using B-W approach, which is useful for prioritising quality attributes, are introduced and compared with Kano's satisfaction indices.