Integrating customers' disparate technology readiness into technological requirement analysis: an extended Kano approach

In high-tech marketing, it is postulated that the population of prospective customers be dichotomised into two different groups: innovative and pragmatic. These two groups differ in terms of when they adopt high-tech products and how they feel about accepting technology. Among others, the fundamental discrepancies in technology readiness between respective groups are of paramount importance in analysing customer requirements. However, few studies consider this customer heterogeneity with respect to technology readiness when classifying and prioritising customer requirements. This paper suggests an extended Kano approach which integrates customers' disparate technology readiness. First, customers are classified into innovative and pragmatic groups using a Technology Readiness Index as a measure. Second, a new integrated Kano matrix is introduced, in which two groups become the column and row values, and which allows four new types of customer requirements to be defined, based on the differences between the two groups. For each category, we specify the relationship between the distinctive features of that category and customer satisfaction.