The Kano Model – A Review of its Application in Marketing Research from 1984 to 2006

Since its introduction in 1984, Kano’s model of attractive quality (Kano et al., 1984) has grabbed the attention of many marketing practitioners and researchers from a wide range of industries, and has evolved into one of the most popular service quality (SQ) models off the traditional SQ theory mainstream, which is pre-dominated by PZB (Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry) and several other authors. Despite the fact that the model originates from the Japanese production sector, it has been successfully implemented and empirically tested in numerous studies across various service settings (e.g. Fuchs and Weiermair, 2004). The major difference in contrast to other widespread quality models, such as the technical and functional quality model (Gronroos, 1984) or the Gap model (PZB, 1985), is that Kano’s model is based on the assumption of existence of nonlinear and asymmetric relationships between attributelevel performance of products/services and overall customer satisfaction (OCS). Thus he uses a categorisation of product/service attributes into quality elements according to the attributes’ nature of impact on OCS. The purpose of this paper is to review the Kano model literature from 1984 to 2006 in order to provide marketing researchers with a reference guide, specifically with regards to the context and focus of previous studies, and the different methodological approaches for the assessment of the different Kano factors.