Marketing of quality

Evaluating quality is a complex issue because there is no uniform, consistent and universally accepted quantifiable measure to evaluate quality in the power supply industry. At the same time in all user surveys, quality is considered as the most important determining factor for the selection of power supply and its manufacturer. Many users mention “quality is given”, which means they will not do business with a company that produces low-quality product, no matter how inexpensive the product may be. So quality is a great marketing tool, but if it cannot be measured quantitatively, then how can it be conveyed to the customer? The traditional measures of quality such as opinion surveys (as used in automobiles) are not applicable to power supplies because many power supplies are custom made for specific applications. Moreover, quality is not only associated with a product, but also with the company, its management, business practices, ethics and many other nonproduct related issues. Quality symbolizes a company and its a relationship with the customer. Since there is no real and direct quantitative measure of quality, it is “measured” indirectly through its association with many other related parameters such as reliability (MTBF), ISO 9000, TQM, JIT, statistical process control (SPC), plug and play etc. This paper explores marketing of this complex issue called quality. Is it just a user´s perception or is there a tangible way a user can evaluate quality?