Journal of Japan Industrial Management Association
Volume, Number, Page
Vol. 63
No. 3
pp. 126-137
Published date
Oct. 17, 2012
Publisher
Japanese:
日本経営工学会
English:
Japan Industrial Management Association
Conference name
Japanese:
English:
Conference site
Japanese:
English:
Abstract
In past years, although the importance of providing customers with affective experiences has been pointed out, there have been few proposals of guidelines and methods to design actual services and products that provide affective experiences.
Meanwhile, in industries, omotenashi has been utilized as a keyword for such services and products that may provide affective experiences.
However, the conceptual definition and elements of omotenashi have not been made clear.
In order to provide design guidelines for services and/or products that provide customers with omotenashi experiences, this study aimed to extract elements of omotenashi, and to develop an evaluation tool to measure how services and/or products are fulfilling these omotenashi elements.
Firstly in this study, based on the results of an intensive literature review, a definition of omotenashi is given.
Secondly, 55 elements of omotenashi are extracted based on the results of the literature review as well as expert interviews and focus group interviews.
Finally, an omotenashi evaluation tool is developed based on these elements, and its practicality is verified by actually applying the developed evaluation tool to 23 services and 19 products. As a result of a factor analysis, a 12-factors structure is identified as essential dimensions for omotenashi.