Identification of satisfaction attributes using competitive analysis of the improvement gap

Purpose – To analyze the limitations of two methods used in the identification of satisfaction attributes in products and services – importance performance analysis (IPA) and Kano method – and to propose a new method for identification of improvement opportunities based on the competitive analysis of the improvement gap.Design/methodology/approach – A case analyzing attributes of the service “rodizio de pizzas” a kind of pizzeria found in Brazil, was used to illustrate the proposed method. Resulting from a focus group, four attributes, one of them being an innovation, were specifically chosen to include the different categories of the Kano model: basic, performance and excitement attributes. A survey was conducted with a random sample of 110 undergraduate students that eat regularly at pizzerias.Findings – As a major limitation, IPA leads to different conclusions depending on how an attribute's importance is figured. Also, it does not take into consideration the non‐linear relationship between the perform...

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