Here's a Quality Definition

So . . . one of the words that gets thrown around a lot in my classes is "quality."  This is a practice that I try to squash early in the semester.  Even though quality is used (over-)extensively in the business world (e.g. "Quality is Job One") and even has legitimate uses (i.e. quality control in an operational sense), it is more or less a meaningless word when applied to marketing.  It usually is applied as a synonym for "good," or "reliable," or "durable," but I don't buy that.  In other words, I think "quality" is a low-quality adjective.  And the same could be said for a lot of other adjectives we use.  Examples after the jump.

While waiting in the copy room for the printer to spit out my makework administrative BS (sort of a TPS report type thing) I glanced through an article from Advertising Age that someone had left lying around.  The article was on taglines, and how there aren't any good ones anymore (really?  "Apply Directly to the Forehead" doesn't qualify?).  The author of the article mentioned that he personally looked through the slogans of every presidential candidate since 1840, and lo and behold, the person with the better slogan always won, without exception. 

Funny thing about that.  What constitutes a "better" slogan?  Isn't one of the characteristics its likelihood to gain votes?  If so, the judgment of the slogan as better owes more to whether the candidate won than any particular aspect of the slogan.  Perhaps this committee-of-one judging the slogans was swayed by whom he knew to be the winners; perhaps instead he just saw these being of higher "quality" because any of the slogans could be considered so, and therefore this backfit rationalization makes sense.

I also recently read (not in the copy room, in my office) an interesting article on the same phenomenon in the business world.  The author, Phil Rosenzweig, looked at a number of books that claim to find the secret qualities that make a great leader or CEO.  The problem is that all of these books and studies use a pool of successful CEOs as a starting point, and find common problems.  This method may look attractive, but its use would lead to conclusions such as that all successful companies have their headquarters in buildings.  It ignores the silent evidence of unsuccessful companies.  In other words, willingness to take risks may be a hallmark of successful companies, but it is also a hallmark of unsuccessful ones.

Other studies cited in the article use a pool of exceptional companies as compared to a pool of average ones.  This too is fraught with risks, as the average company is not representative of the whole.  For example, using risk-willingness again, maybe the most successful and unsuccessful companies use that strategy, and average companies do not.  Again, erroneous conclusions.

The problem lies in the fact that we take outcomes and infer characteristics.  This is made worse when those characteristics are vague, like "quality", or "best", or "leadership."  For example consider the following statement: Bill Gates must be very smart because he is rich.  While it is possible that Bill Gates is smart, the reasoning to get to the statement is faulty.  There are rich people who are not smart (e.g. most professional athletes end up broke because they think themselves capable of wise financial decisions) and plenty of smart people who are not rich (look in a humanties department of a university).  And what does it mean to be "smart," anyway?  The word has too many possible definitions.

As does "quality."  Every product in existence could claim to be "high-quality" (or the even-less-defensible "hi-quality") on some level.  Volvo is the highest quality with regard to safety (or so they claim).  Rogers has the highest quality with regard to network reliability (or so they claim).  McDonald's has the highest quality when you're looking for weight and cardiac problems (I'm pretty sure they don't claim that one).  So the next time you're justifying a purchase by saying it's high-quality, consider what that actually means.  Hopefully your product excels in some area, and that area is not just its ability to persuade you to buy it.