KANO Model for experience quality measurement of wine tourism events

1 Objective

The decline of wine exports as well as rising wine imports for winegrowers in the last 20 years has led to a fundamental change in the wine market in Germany (Hanf & Schweickert, 2014). This saturated market situation results in a market adjustment in form of a decrease of small and micro-enterprises on the one hand (Deutsches Weininstitut, 2019). On the other hand, winegrowing enterprises have started looking for alternative business models (Rüdiger & Hanf, 2021). One of the alternative ways of marketing wine and generating additional business income is wine tourism. Various studies show that a large number of German wineries are involved in this area of cultural tourism and have integrated different tourism elements into their business concept (Rüdiger, 2021; Rüdiger, 2023; Dreyer, 2012; Dreyer, 2021). The focus of this contribution is on the marketing opportunities offered by wine tourism and the generation of additional income (Rüdiger, 2021). Thus, the niche market of wine tourism events will be selected as the basis for this study.

Due to this increasing wine tourism offer, it becomes more and more difficult for providers to differentiate themselves from competitors. Consumers can choose from a wide selection of wine tourism offers so that consumer behavior can be steered by creating memorable experiences. Currently, both wine tourism marketer as well as wine destinations (Schwarzwald Tourismus GmbH, 2021; Trier Tourismus und Marketing GmbH, 2021) take advantage of this trend of experience staging. However, winegrowers know little about the concrete experience components the customer prioritizes when visiting a wine tourism event. Therefore, the study aims to answer the following research question: How is the experience staging at wine tourism events perceived by customers? The study should provide added value for the wine tourism industry in general and for wineries offering wine tourism events in particular.

2 Theoretical basis

Customers do not buy products or services – they buy feelings, dreams, enjoyment and surprises (Bolz, 2002; Wiedmann & Hennigs, 2012; Kilian, 2009). The beginnings of the customers’ desire to seek for experiences was already discovered in 1982: The hedonic consumption of Hirschman and Holbrook (1982, pp. 92–94) assumes that a consumption is valuable when memorable experiences are produced. From a neobehaviourist perspective, an experience is defined as the felt and remembered impact of an event on a consumer, based on his or her individual perception and dependent on his or her situational receptivity (Sundbo & Sørensen, 2013). Connecting the behavioural and the business perspective, an experience is the stage for a service, making it memorable (Brunner-Sperdin, 2008).

This change of customer needs also led to a new experience-oriented management approach. The beginnings can be found in the executions about the experience economy written by Pine and Gilmore: The staging of experiences should be understood as a theatre, where a script for the experience is created and employees, customers and management act as actors (Pine & Gilmore, 2013). The aim to create memorable experiences for the customer is also recommended by other scientists: “If you sell undifferentiated products, you compete solely on price; but if you provide experiences that consumers want, you offer a differentiated service for which a premium can be charged (Patterson, Hodgson, & Shi 2008, p. 30).” Also Schmitt (1999, p. 22) recommends that companies should anchor themselves in consumers’ lives: “Dazzle their senses, touch their hearts, and stimulate their minds.” Today, customer experience management is a common management principle. It can be defined as the systematic analysis, planning, implementation, and control of all touchpoints to create a memorable customer experience (Schmitt, 2003; Schnorbus, 2016).

For the tourism industry, this change in customer needs can be seen as a positive driver in general, as the desire for experiences can be fulfilled through tourism services being part of the fun and leisure branch itself. However, the mere fact that travel is an experience itself is not sufficient to create successful tourism experiences. Hence, customer experience management is an important approach for the tourism industry as well.

From the scientific perspective, the common methods of business performance measurement should be adapted as well to integrate the experience-oriented view. One main success factor of business performance is quality with an extensive research field of satisfaction measurement. However, pure satisfaction measurement reaches its limits for various reasons and does not adequately explain the experience effects:

1. Customers who merely state that they are satisfied do not yet behave loyally. This requires customer enthusiasm, because customers who are satisfied enthusiastically are six times more likely to buy again than customers who are merely satisfied (Jones & Sasser, 1995).

2. Traditional satisfaction measurement based on the Confirmation-Disconfirmation-Paradigm assumes that the pure cognitive matching of expectations and experiences determines the success of a product or service (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry, 1985). However, the perception of experiences is highly influenced by emotions.

To integrate these experience specialties in this research field, the KANO model can provide interesting insights (Kano et al., 1984, cited in Bruhn, 2020): The KANO model distinguishes between three different satisfaction levels of requirements:

1. Basic requirements (‘dissatisfiers’) are referred to as Must-be-criteria, which are assumed and considered important by the customer, but unconsciously have no effect on satisfaction and offer no opportunities for differentiation from the competition.

2. Performance requirements (‘criticals’) or one-dimensional-criteria, on the other hand, are explicitly articulated and can have an effect both on satisfaction and dissatisfaction with a service. Both explicitly and implicitly, they have a high relevance from the customer’s perspective.

3. Finally, enthusiasm factors (‘satisfiers’) as attractive-criteria only have an impact on satisfaction, since they are not explicitly formulated and expected, and are thus not explicitly, but only unconsciously, considered (Bruhn, 2020). Enthusiasm requirements are often also referred to as surprising moments of delight (Go & Govers, 2009). Thus, especially those requirements can be used to create experiences.

To conclude, the combination of the KANO model and the findings about the perception of experiences seems to be an interesting research field.

3 Material and Methods

To answer the research question, how the experience staging at wine tourism events is perceived by customers, a quantitative customer online survey is conducted. The existing questionnaire combines different items to measure experience quality, which are relevant for wine tourism events, with the defined KANO methodology to identify the three types of requirements.

The items of experience quality for wine tourism events (Fig. 1) are based on a comprehensive meta-analysis of a total of 28 research papers on dimensions of service quality on the one hand and experience quality on the other hand (Schnorbus, 2016). For service quality, the Servqual dimensions have been prioritized (Parasuraman et al., 1988). A comparison of the dimensions of experience quality can be seen, for example, in Ober-Heilig et al. (2012).

1. Social: Interaction with other customers or employees

2. Relevant: Create a meaning for the customer

3. Multisensual: Appeal as many senses as possible

4. Cognitive: Learning possibilities

5. Participative: Co-design of the experience

6. Emotional: Arouse emotions

7. Surprising: Contains something unexpected

8. Coherent: Coordination of all experience components

9. Convenient: Effortless processes

As the emotional reaction can only be measured during or after the experience, this experience dimension was excluded in the survey. All other dimensions have been operated into wine tourism-specific items and variables.

To determine the KANO requirements for every item of wine tourism experience quality, both the functional question ‘Would you be happy if XY were present?’ and the dysfunctional question ‘Would you be disappointed if XY were not present?’ are asked. For both types of questions, the same response options such as ‘I would be happy about that.’, ‘I assume that.’, ‘I don’t care about that.’, ‘I could accept that’, or ‘That would bother me.’ are used (Bruhn, 2020; Bergner et al., 1993; Sauerwein, 2000). With the survey a random sampling for all visitors of wine tourism events was not possible. However, as all customers of the Staatlicher Hofkeller Würzburg were contacted as a possible survey sample, it was possible to draw transferrable conclusions for wine tourism events. Quantitative research allows standardized, comparable and generalizable statements about facts and existing conjectures, but only permits limited answers to be given about personal motives and motivations (Manning & Bodine, 2012). Additionally, a KANO survey results in a long questionnaire that can lead to fatigue and is only conditionally suitable for a written survey (Matzler et al., 2001). Thus, the risk of a high dropout rate of participants has to be taken into account.

Figure 1:

Experience dimensions and items for wine tourism events

Source: Own presentation based on Schnorbus (2016)

4 Results

The questionnaire was available from January 2022 to March 2022 and was sent to customers via the newsletter and website of the winery Staatlicher Hofkeller Würzburg. A total of 360 participants took part in the survey, thereof 53 % male and 47 % female. All age groups from 18 years on upwards were represented with a ddd on the age group 40 to 59 years (Fig. 2). Compared to the German population, the sample has a higher age structure (Destatis, 2023), especially in the group of 40 to 60 years, which corresponds to the demand structures in wine tourism (Rüdiger et al., 2015). With few exceptions, the sample consists of employees (81 %), civil servants (5 %), the self-employed (6 %) and pensioners (6 %).

Figure 2:

Age distribution in %

Firstly, the individual answers per respondent and item had to be combined into one of the following requirement categories (Meffert, Bruhn, & Hadwich, 2018):

1. A: Attractive (Enthusiasm requirement)

2. M: Must-Be (Basic requirement)

3. O: One-dimensional (Performance requirement)

4. I: Indifferent (Irrelevant requirement)

5. R: Reverse (Non-requirement)

6. Questionable (Non-assessable requirement)

Therefore, the following analysis rule was used for the respective response pair of functional (‘Would you be happy if XY were present?’) and dysfunctional (‘Would you be disappointed if XY were not present?’) question per item (Fig. 3) and participant.

For example, for the item ‘friendliness of employees’ the question pair was answered as follows:

1. What do you think about employees being friendly? – I would be happy about that.

2. What do you think about employees not being friendly? – I could accept that.

For this example, the requirement category ‘A’ (Attractive) results from the combination of the answer ‘I would be happy about it’ in the row of functional question and ‘I could accept it’ in the column of dysfunctional question in Figure 3. In total, for each answer pair of functional and dysfunctional question, a requirement category could be conducted per participant based on the analysis rule of Figure 3:

After having identified the requirement category per item and participant based on the rules of Figure 3, in the next step, the KANO requirements per item were aggregated across participants. The result is a frequency table in which the most selected category defines the KANO requirement category (Fig. 4):

If the distribution for a characteristic is similar for several requirements, the following decision rules are to be applied (Sauerwein, 2000):

1. If frequency (M + A + O) > frequency (I + Q + R) = Maximum of M, A or O

2. If frequency (M + A + O) < frequency (I + Q + R) = Maximum of I, Q or R

This approach is justified by the fact that Attractive, Must-be and One-dimensional requirements all represent important features for the customers whereas all Indifferent, Reverse and Questionable items does not seem to be important for them. The application of these rules all confirms the results of Figure 4. Thus, no categories from Figure 4 have to be converted afterwards and it can be interpreted as a first confirmation of the quality of the data set.

A further check of the correct assignment of the characteristic to a requirement category is provided by the Category Strength (CAT). This indicates how clearly the assignment to a requirement category differs from the other response categories. Therefore, the second most frequent category is subtracted from the most frequent response (Hölzing, 2008).^[1] The value should be at least 5 %. The application for the present data set confirms the clear assignment except for the following two characteristics:

1. Service competence of employees (Attractive, 4,4 %)

2. Common wine enjoyment (Attractive, 3,1 %).

Supplementary, the Total Strength method indicates the importance of an item by adding up all positive requirement categories, i. e. Attractive, Must-be and One-dimensional requirements (Hölzing, 2008).^[2] This value should be above 50 %. This can be confirmed for all items except of the following:

1. Modern design (Indifferent, 26,7 %)

2. Traditional design (Indifferent, 38,1 %),

3. Participation (Indifferent, 28,3 %),

4. Fit to destination offers (Indifferent, 28,6 %).

Since only irrelevant requirements were classified as insignificant in the Total Strength method, this result corresponds to the classification in Figure 4.

Moreover, the impact of the different items to the overall experience quality shall be analyzed. Therefore, a positive and negative satisfaction coefficient is calculated for the Attractive, Must-be and One-dimensional requirements (Sauerwein, 2000): The coefficients can take a value between 0 and |1|^[3]‌^,[4]. If the value is close to 0, the requirement has little explanatory value for the existence of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. On the contrary, a value close to |1| has high explanatory value for satisfaction (+1) or dissatisfaction (–1).

Ultimately, only the significant satisfaction coefficients should be considered. For this purpose, the Fong test is used in order to confirm that the assignment of an item to a specific requirement is significant. This is always the case when the in-equation of the fong test is not fulfilled (Hölzing, 2008)^[5]. Here, ‘a’ and ‘b’ stand for the frequency of the most and second most mention and ‘n’ for the number of respondents. Of the 18 features rated by the customers as relevant (Attractive, Must-be, One-dimensional), only two features had to be excluded from further analysis due to lack of significance:

Figure 3:

KANO matrix for wine tourism events

1. Service competence of employees (Attractive)

2. Common wine enjoyment (Attractive)

The corresponding Fong test results with the Category Strength test again confirm the data quality. The remaining 16 items can be prioritized on the basis of their satisfaction coefficients as shown in Figure 3:

It becomes clear that the Enthusiasm factors have the greatest influence on satisfaction (CS+), while the basic factors all have high values in the dissatisfaction coefficient (CS-). This is hardly surprising, since basic features are expected as natural mandatory criteria and do not represent satisfaction drivers. Enthusiasm factors, on the other hand, have a disproportionate effect on satisfaction when present, but do not negatively influence dissatisfaction. It is also noticeable that customers defined only one item as achievement requirement (friendliness of employees), which can affect customer satisfaction both positively and negatively. However, the influence on dissatisfaction (CS- = –0.99) is to be classified significantly larger than the satisfaction effect (CS+ = 0.55).

5 Interpretation

The research aims to identify and evaluate requirements of experience quality of wine tourism events. The research question can be answered with the help of the KANO matrix (Fig. 5). This matrix summarizes all important experience components. The perfect wine tourism event should have a hygiene concept, a wine store, sufficient parking facilities and measures against overcrowding as well as skilled personnel as basic features. In order to satisfy the customer, friendly staff is also required. Convenience drivers such as the avoidance of waiting times, a bad-weather concept and connections to public transportation come into question as enthusiasm features. Besides, offers for children, the theming of the event, a wide selection of wine tourism offers as well as the fulfillment of special requests, the possibility to learn new things about wine, the integration of the event into the vacation package as well as the offer of food have the potential to excite the customer and to differentiate from the competition.

To sum up, the Top 3 requirements with most impact on satisfaction are the following:

1. Catering (Attractive, CS+ = 0,75)

2. Vacation component (Attractive, CS+ = 0,68)

3. Wine knowledge (Attractive, CS+ = 0,64)

The Top 3 requirements with most impact on dissatisfaction are:

1. Friendliness of employees (One-dimensional, CS- = 0,99)

2. Wine knowledge of employees (Must-be, CS- = –0,85)

3. Hygiene concept (Must-be, CS- = –0,79)

Thus, when planning a wine tourism event, the selection and training of the staff (friendliness and wine knowledge) in addition to the hygiene concept is essential. Even if these factors do not yet lead to a perceived wine experience, they are taken for granted by the respondents. To then turn a wine event into an experience, the event should consist of special food offers to differentiate from other providers. Additionally, the event should be part of a holistic holiday experience (for example in form of packages from the destination management organization). Finally, the possibility to learn more about wine should be included in the event to become an experience.

An important constraint on the future design of wine tourism events arises from the interrelationship of the requirement categories. They cannot be easily set off against each other, i. e. a non-fulfilled basic factor cannot be compensated by the fulfilled performance factor. Therefore, all basic characteristics should always be fulfilled first. In addition, the fulfillment of enthusiasm characteristics should be chosen carefully. These develop into basic factors over time as customer experience and customer expectations increase (Bruhn, 2000).

6 Conclusion

The Kano model is a useful tool to identify and prioritize different levels of customer satisfaction requirements. The exact knowledge of the relevant characteristics is required for a meaningful application of this model. The present study provides a valuable contribution to identifying requirements for a wine tourism event. A central result is that the friendliness of the staff was identified as the only performance requirement with both a positive and negative impact on customer satisfaction. While factors such as a hygiene concept or knowledgeable staff are seen by participants as basic requirements, enthusiasm can be generated via the catering, the embedding in a holiday experience and the opportunity to learn new things about wine. Compared to the experience dimensions of Figure 1, no serious differences between the dimensions can be identified. This means on the one hand, that all experience dimensions have an impact on the experience quality of wine tourism events. On the other hand, it should not be recommended to focus only on one or several experience dimensions.

Based on the research results, the conclusions are addressed to the providers of those happenings. The recommendations refer to the design of those events in order to stage them in an experience-oriented way. Thus, the attractiveness for customers should be increased as well as the economic success for wineries.

The Kano model also has some weaknesses^[6]. In addition to the high survey effort due to the answer pair of functional and dysfunctional question per characteristic, the answer options might lead to a subjective response behaviour. Additionally, the complex model of functional and dysfunctional question with identical answer options might result in a wrong understanding of the survey. Moreover, the assumption that attractive criteria never lead to dissatisfaction and must-be criteria never lead to satisfaction are insufficiently validated (Sauerwein, 2000). Furthermore, the lack of a theoretical foundation for the model itself and the division of requirements into three parts can be criticized (Hölzing, 2007). This also applies to the quality criteria such as category strength, total strength and the Fong test. The definition of these threshold values sometimes seems arbitrary.

Future research needs arise from the perception of the optimized experience-staged events from the customer’s point of view in the form of a measurement of experience quality. Furthermore, a transfer of the measurement approach to other wine tourism segments or tourism areas may lead to further research projects.