Yes, you read it right: it’s not that quality is at risk, it’s more that quality is a risk itself.
I don’t despise ISO 9001 and the many quality-oriented standards, I’m simply looking at the market as it is.
PURCHASE CHEAP & COUNTERFEIT
In a recent market survey conducted in Rome among young people more than 75% of them declared they prefer to buy cheap, counterfeited products as compared to the expensive OEMs’ brands.
Looking at other consumers’ habits, it’s evident the increasing success of hard discount supermarkets and of Internet low-priced sales. It’s a trend that speaks by itself against branded quality.
It’s equally evident the consumers’ preferred attitude toward low prices as compared to high priced trumpeted quality, and this is evident in the Industry, as well.
“TOO MUCH QUALITY WILL KILL YOU”
Paraphrasing Queen’s song, “too much quality will kill you”, this is what I mean.
Money is running short everywhere, in the consumers’ pockets. The average western consumer cannot afford anymore to spend as he/she did in the past decades, the eastern consumers too.
The ones who can afford high spending are the very rich ones and they care much more for image than for quality.
If you saw the film Still Life, the protagonist John May represented quality well: precise, meticulous to paranoia, and alone, doing a useless job. These are the risks of Quality.
ISO’s endeavors to enhance products’ and services’ quality throughout the world have to be appreciated. Yet as it has happened for too many years in Italy, legislation is practically useless when it is not effectively enforced.
Therefore, let’s be much more careful when we speak and write of ‘quality.’ ‘Quality’ is not as important as it once was even in a quality culture in Italy.
Counterfeiting is the word of the day. Counterfeiting mostly relates to products, less often to services. But even ideas can be copied and be counterfeit. And, this can be the most severe risk of all.
PRACTICAL WORKABLE MEANING OF QUALITY
We have to give Quality practical, workable meaning beyond simply measuring quality in terms of PPMs or measuring SPC charts.
We must investigate what consumers and buyers mean by ‘Quality’ and what they are willing to pay for. Last but not least we must stop ignoring that Quality – like truth – is in the eye of the beholder.
Since the second half of the 90’s, we’ve seen quality being pushed as a means and device to increase sales. At the same time, we have experienced cheap pricing as the main competitor to Quality.
So, what’s the real motivation for consumers and companies to buy Quality but not Counterfeit?
Many big companies are noisily advertising their products’ and services’ quality. The challenge is that if the products and services are flawed, then recall campaigns and scandals can be very expensive. The ultimate cost of which is unfortunately paid by the consumers often unaware of the complex market mechanisms hidden beneath glazing advertisements.
So, quality is not always what it is made to look like. It can be a facade.
Quality, when excessively pursued, can be a paranoid-like symptom or mania, unless it is married to more holistic views of ‘organizations’ and ‘things’, also bringing in the concept of enterprise risk.
As an example, I would mention the quasi-maniacal requests made by Certification Bodies to candidate auditors and to auditors for their resumé or curriculum vitae and related updates. Once an auditor is qualified as such, what need is there that he or she provide evidence of his or her professional status?
It should be left instead up to the auditor’s qualification or Certification Body to monitor the auditor’s performance and ascertain its conformance to the agreed standard(s).
If Quality is to be perceived as real and critically important, then we have to stop talking of it in terms of number of registered companies or organizations. We must start speaking in terms of quality of registered companies or organizations, their performance, their reliability and accountability.
If we don’t do this, it is my opinion that risk management will keep winning over quality management.
Meaning that ‘Quality’ will be more and more looked at as a meaningless tag.
Quality as a sales device has to kept at bay even more so when a company or organization feels that sales are its Achille’s heel and when it will say that it provides quality products when it clearly doesn’t.