Abstract
How can customer satisfaction be improved in order to gain a competitive advantage? To begin to answer this question, one must look first at the needs of the customer and what they expect from an enterprise. This research aims to establish emerging trends in customer needs and by extension provide market indicators, which will guide marketing strategies for small-and-medium-sized companies. This analysis will focus on retail trade. Consumers were requested to select an enterprise based on the type of business, and their integrated satisfaction ratings for the enterprise and element requested were investigated. We then analyzed the correlation between those variables by applying the technique of KANSEI engineering. Finally, we examined the selection criteria used by the consumer based on the type of business they were evaluating.
