Carnival Cruise Animal Towels – Our Family’s Experience and the Kano Model

In previous posts about my recent cruise vacation, I shared about a Poka Yoke Toilet and the Customer Relationship Management at Carnival Cruise. Today, I want to share a little bit about the Kano Model, Animal Towels, and how Carnival Cruise delights the customer.

The Kano Model attempts to explain the basic fundamental features required for a product to meet a customer need. Any other features above and beyond those that meet the basic customer need can fall into two categories:

1. Features the customer doesn’t care about
2. Features that delight the customer

The easiest way to think about the Kano Model is to use the analogy of the spoon.

Analogy of the Spoon

Suppose you are on a deserted island with no eating utensils. Then, to your surprise, you find a spoon made our of gold. Under normal circumstances, finding gold would be a good thing, but on this deserted island, gold has no value. But, the utility of the spoon, on the other hand, with its curved end used to scoop food and other material has a very high value.

But, to your disappointment, this object made out of gold turns out not to have a curved end and cannot scoop anything. In other words, it’s not even a spoon. It’s just a gold whatever.

The Lesson

It’s a silly analogy, but the point is this: on this deserted island you need to have your basic needs met. Providing a gold like-spoon object but doesn’t actually have the ability to scoop food or any other material will not meet your needs. And, even though the object is made out of gold, it still doesn’t do any good. In other words, it has no value to you.

Carnival Cruise

The Carnival Cruise staff did an amazing job. They truly took great care of us. All of our needs were met. But, they went above and beyond. One example of delighting the customer is their daily surprise of the guest with Animal Towels.

The carnival cruise cabin staff doesn’t just clean your room, but they give you daily mints and they also surprise the guest with really cool towel animals that add that extra oomph for the guest when they enter their newly cleaned room: It’s just not a clean room, which every guest has come to expect, but it’s a clean room with a surprise that makes the guest smile. Now that’s delighting the customer.

Here’s a picture of me learning how to make an animal towel:

Below are several examples of Towel Animals: