Do You Know Quality Is An Excellence And Reliability?

 

A product can be thought of as a bundle of attributes. The attributes of many physical
products include their form, features, performance, durability, reliability, style, and design. Product is said to have superior quality when customers perceive that its attributes
provide them with higher utility than the attributes of products sold by rivals. For example, iPhone  mobile phone has attributes—such as design, styling, performance, and reliability—that customers perceive as being superior to the same attributes in many other mobile phones. Thus,we can refer to  iPhone as a high-quality product: iPhone has differentiated its mobile phones by these attributes.

When customers evaluate the quality of a product, they commonly measure it against
two kinds of attributes: those related to quality as excellence and those related to quality
as reliability. From a quality-as-excellence perspective, the important attributes are things
such as a product’s design and styling, its aesthetic appeal, its features and functions,
the level of service associated with the delivery of the product, and so on.

Customers can purchase a pair of imitation leather boots for $25 from Wal-Mart, or they can
buy a handmade pair of butter-soft leather boots from Nordstrom for $500. The boots from
Nordstrom will have far superior styling, feel more comfortable, and look much better than
those from Wal-Mart. The value consumers will get from the Nordstrom boots will in all
probability be much greater than the value derived from the Wal-Mart boots, but of course,
they will have to pay far more for them. That is the point: when excellence is built into a
product offering, consumers must pay more to own or consume it.

With regard to quality-as-reliability perspective, a product can be said to be reliable when it consistently performs the function it was designed for, performs it well, and rarely, if ever,
breaks down. As with excellence, reliability increases the value (utility) a consumer gets
from a product, and thus the price the company can charge for that product and/or demand
for the product.
The concept of quality applies whether we are talking about Toyota automobiles,
clothes designed and sold by Versace, Verizon’s wireless service, the customer service department of Barclays, or the ability of airlines to arrive on time. Quality is just as relevant to
services as it is to goods. The impact of high product quality on competitive advantage is
twofold. 

First, providing high-quality products increases the value (utility) those products
provide to customers, which gives the company the option of charging a higher price for
the products. In the automobile industry, for example, Toyota has historically been able to
charge a high

Second, greater efficiency and lower unit costs associated with reliable products of high
quality impact competitive advantage. When products are reliable, less employee time is
wasted making defective products, or providing substandard services, and less time has to
be spent fixing mistakes—which means higher employee productivity and lower unit costs.
Thus, high product quality not only enables a company to differentiate its product from that
of rivals, but, if the product is reliable, it also lowers costs.