Applying the Kano model and QFD to explore customers' brand contacts in the hotel business: A study of a hot spring hotel

Brand contacts are a variety of elements about how customers come into contact with a brand and how they communicate their values about it to other potential customers. For the sake of cost and efficiency, brand contacts can be investigated not only from a customer perspective but also from that of the service provider. This paper thus attempts to integrate the Kano model and quality function deployment (QFD) to explore brand contact elements. The results gained from an empirical study of a hot spring hotel indicate that customers' perceptions about contact elements are mostly classified into one-dimensional and must-be attributes by the Kano model. The proposed approach contributes to the creation of attractive contact elements that have an enormous potential to further increase customer satisfaction and differentiate competitors. Moreover, along with the 10 technical characteristics obtained by the integrated approach, the customers' contact experiences are displayed through the brand contact priority grid, both of which provide references for future hotel business development. Lastly, atmosphere-oriented brand contacts dominate customers' brand perceptions more than others, in that they lessen customers' sense of risk and uncertainty toward product/service offerings. A discussion of the findings including managerial implications is also presented in this paper.