Monday, August 25, 2008
Quality Sucks
“We’re Number One in Quality”, or a variant thereof, is the tagline used by a huge number of business. Count how many times it's used in ads in the Yellow Pages. It’s seen many times emblazoned on the sides of a truck. And it's the wrong thing to say.
Quality has become a generic, meaningless word in business today. You could fill every inch of wall space in a standard office cubicle with Dilbert cartoons about quality. Open the Yellow Pages again and see how many times competing companies use the term. Overuse has robbed it of any true meaning. Quality is an ambiguous, subjective term. 
To one consumer, it means that the product still works after a few years, to another it can mean the parts are made from the purest materials and manufactured to tolerances that can only be described as "anal-retentive".
If quality is really one of the factors that separates you from your competitors, use something more specific to describe it. Are you "focused on the tiniest details"? Has your product been "relentlessly tested"? Maybe you're "so efficient, saving customers tons of money on raw materials". Defining what specifically makes you better than your competitors is a subject for another post (or even a book), but it's vitally important to your marketing and advertising being effective.
