Product Quality: An Investigation into the Concept and How It Is Perceived by Consumers

If having a customer orientation is central to marketing effectiveness, studying how consumers perceive the quality of products and services is undoubtedly important. This book, by a European author, investigates product quality as perceived by consumers and manufacturers, and in my opinion contributes significantly to marketing knowledge in the United States. In a broader context, this book may serve to sensitize us to search increasingly for European contributions to marketing knowledge. The book consists of 13 chapters, divided into four parts. In the first part, Steenkamp reviews the literature to consider the concept of product quality from four different perspectives: metaphysics, production management, economics, and consumer behavior. The first two approaches are discussed in Chapter 2. The metaphysical perspective considers quality in terms of innate excellence, as an unanalyzable property that can be recognized only through experience. It is interesting to see that the concept of quality already has been discussed by Aristotle as one of his "categories." The production management approach is concerned with objective determination of quality and, hence, the setting of specifications. Cost considerations associated with quality improvements and the notion that "quality is free" (Crosby 1979) enter into this perspective. The economic approach (Chapter 3) takes quality to be a competitive weapon. In reviewing the economic approach, the author critically discusses a wide range of economic theories pertaining to the supply side and the demand side of the market. Some theories consider the consumer to be perfectly informed; Lancaster's (1971) characteristics model and the hedonic approach (Rosen 1974) are probably the best known. More recently, economic theory has devoted attention to the notion that the consumer usually is imperfectly informed, which has given rise to an extensive body of literature on the "economics of information" and the validity of market signals of quality such as price and advertising. This literature is discussed in considerable detail.