Kano's Theory of Attractive Quality and Packaging

Abstract

The traditional role of packaging in consumer products has been to store and protect the content. Current consumer and industry trends, however, suggest an increasingly important role for packaging as a marketing vehicle. One question of immediate interest is how packaging should be designed to be associated with high quality from a customer perspective. The authors believe that this type of investigation is needed since there is relatively little theoretical work in the area of packaging, and research in the area of packaging and perceptions of quality has been sparse.An empirical investigation of how customers experience packaging in everyday commodities was conducted in order to increase the authors' knowledge of the role of packaging in the perception of quality. The research study was based on Kano's theory of attractive quality and investigates how 24 quality attributes of packages are perceived by customers. A questionnaire was mailed to 1500 randomly chosen Swedes asking them about their experiences of packaging in everyday commodities. The authors' results provide evidence that there are quality attributes of packaging, such as recyclable material and resealabilily, that are attractive to customers and influence the decision to buy and use the product.