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. (Punctuality in trains, waiting times with the NHS, processing power in mobile phones.) They are often important, but by no means as decisive as they seem. In one study, it was found that the greatest determinant of people’s satisfaction with Royal Mail was not the reliability of the postal service, but whether they liked their postie.

Negative qualities. These are ‘enhancements’ which actively annoy many customers. One example would be self-check-in at airports. A few frequent travellers may value it, but most hate it. (I once saw a man utterly bemused by a check-in kiosk and wandered over to help, only to discover that he was a Nobel Laureate.)

Delight qualities. These are often the most interesting because they deliver extraordinary gains in happiness at very little cost. Unfortunately, because they seem unquantifiable to the engineers or finance people making the decisions, they are often the first to be cut. The glass roof in the new London cabs is a delight quality: most of London’s architectural value is above eye level. Yet I cannot begin to imagine how many arguments the poor designer must have endured to get this enhancement into production. Steve Jobs understood this very well: notably the first iPhone didn’t do much, but it did it delightfully.

Several things emerge from the Kano model. It explains why even well-run monopolies and public sector organisations provide poor service. Without feedback from consumer choice, you become better and better at doing the wrong thing. But, as examples such as the National Blood and Transplant Service show, a Kano-sensitive public service can be very good.

My contention is that the contemporary obsession with narrow numerical logic in business is annoying the hell out of us, while also destroying the things that most delight us. Put simply, the people who built St Pancras station instinctively understood Kano theory; the people who built Euston didn’t.

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