The PDMA Handbook of New Product Development

18.7. Needs-Ranking: "What Customer Needs Should We Target for New Product Ideas?"

The Kano method helps classify customer needs, but does not tell you which needs are most important to meet. Therefore, a needs-ranking survey complements Kano. Both are ideal tools to use right after the NPD team has conducted contextual interviews/ethnography to identify many raw customer needs. Typically, contextual interviews/ethnography yields a set of 20-40 raw customer needs. However, since the interviews are totally qualitative, the team does not know which needs are most critical. And they need to know which are the top needs to be able to focus their efforts. A needs-ranking survey is simply a way of having customers rank the importance of a list of needs.

Given 20-40 customer needs, a normal rating survey is too long and tedious. No one likes to see a full page of questions with "strongly disagree" to "neutral" to "strongly agree" Likert scales. This results in low response rates and bad data from those fatigued respondents who actually complete the survey. A second problem with conventional rating surveys is that all the customer needs tend to come out as being rated important. That does not help the team prioritize its efforts.

Table 18.5. KANO METHOD CLASSIFICATION MAPPING.

Need not being met → Need fully addressed↓	Like it that way	Must be that way	Neutral	Live with it	Dislike it that way
Like it that way	Not paying Attention	Exciter	Exciter	Exciter	More Is Better
Must be that way	Counterintuitive ...