E-Marketing Professionals

Second, people often can't tell a product's quality by looking at it. Consider buying a television receiver. You go into Circuit City and see a hundred different sets with the picture on and the sound blaring. You Look at a few popular brands that you favor. The picture quality is similar with most receivers. The casings may differ but hardly tell you any¬thing about the set's reliability. You don't ask the salesperson to open the back of the set to inspect the quality of the components. In the end, you have at best an image of quality without any evidence.

Third, most companies are catching up to each other in quality in most markets. When that happens, quality is no longer a determinant of brand choice.

Fourth, some companies are known to have the highest quality, such as Motorola when it touts its 6 sigma quality. But are there enough cus¬tomers who need that quality level and will pay for it? And what were Motorola's costs of getting to 6 sigma quality? It is possible that getting to the highest quality level costs too much.