Transcription
of this third category of things. Now, bear in mind Kano was at the University of Tokyo. He worked a lot with the Japanese consumer electronics industry. He called them delighters, or whatever the Japanese for delighters is.
And that would be, to those of our age, the eject mechanism. In other words, you put a ludicrously disproportionate amount of effort into a gorgeous eject mechanism because although it has no real bearing on the functional attribute of the product itself, it disproportionately accounts for the person's affection for it.
I argue there's this concept called reverse benchmarking. I was influenced in this by Roger Martin's piece called "Benchmarking is for Losers." He argues that when you benchmark, you actually put an enormous amount of effort. He's very popular with people like, sort of, you know, McKinsey, cuz you can do a really laborious benchmarking exercise, but you end up effectively competing on the expected. You become more and more alike to your competitors, you lose differentiation and distinctiveness. And he's absolutely right about this.