What is the difference between actual and perceived quality

Competence: Does the repair shop staff have the knowledge and skill to get the job done right? Do they convey trust and confidence? Responsiveness: Is the sales staff willing to help customers and provide prompt service? Empathy: Does the bank provide caring, individualized attention to its customers?

You can obtain this excellent book here You can download powerpoint slide on brand equity and marketing management here. Main Menu Home. Brand Management. Consumer Psychology. Managing CRM. Strategic Management. One should always expect consumers will put their product or service through the ringer when it comes to their various applications.

Brands have been increasingly making sure that their products and services always have a ready and able support and customer service system in place. You do not want angry consumers. So having adequate serviceability is obviously a massive impact on perceived quality.

Especially that of the good princess. People like pretty things, plain and simple. So adding an element of appeal and panache when it comes to presenting your wares will definitely bump up the perceived quality people will give your brand.

And the princess will no doubt give you a boon or four. Now, in a previous point in this article, lowering prices was referenced. This is because people generally assume that if a product in a sea of similar products is on offer for a lower price, it implies that it may be a budget option. Playing with this concept in a variety of ways is how brands can sometimes boost their sales and revenue strategically.

You can find many brands dropping limited editions of things they usually offer, only with a slightly different and perhaps more attractive appearance, and with a jarringly higher price tag. But with luxury goods, brand owners put a lot of resources and planning into the experience leading up to a sale.

Posh, stylish surroundings and fixtures, exceptional service at a whim, refined or sophisticated music playing in the background and other similar trappings create an atmosphere of comfort, trust and massive perceived quality. The potential new driver of a shiny new sports car glides along the floor from the dealership door to the car door much more smoothly when enticed to put the money down.

It should be obvious that the perceived quality of a product is a personal and subjective gauge of how good something is. Smart brands know how to work this to their advantage. A few trimmings here and a couple of neon streaks there, and you can guide your consumers along a path from the door to the register with relative ease.

But is that enough to create a strong brand? The longer answer is that smart brand managers and marketing pros utilise the perceptions of quality as part of a wider brand strategy. Transparency is a wonderful thing. Brand owners achieve this in the form of conveying all relevant information about their products smoothly and clearly. Putting adequate effort into advertisements is also crucial.

More exposure means more sales. Adding a personal touch is just as formidable as well. Along with a bunch of other handy dandy techniques that brand owners use as their bread and butter. Your product should speak for itself through and through. Painting a less believable picture of a product can only detract from the overall user experience the consumer is going to have.

As previously mentioned, perceived quality is an intangible aspect almost purely governed by the mind. So it does no service to your brand image to pump it up when it can already do that without the need for boasting. Brands like Apple, Audi and British Airways are great examples of this. They have a high perceived quality, because they actually offer quality to their customers. Making sure that the pricing is reasonable and not intimidating, for example, is a good strategy in any situation.

Ironing out any issues pertaining to your warranty strategy is also a great idea. Through the use of the Brunswik model and a multi-attribute performance approach, perceived and objective quality are compared by means of a set of product attributes, to determine which of these has the greatest explanatory power with regard to overall product performance measurements.

Although several researchers have addressed the topic of objective vs. Pearson correlations between the significance of the attributes to overall evaluations of objective quality vs. Regression analyses were consistent with these results. A breakdown of this negative value into its components indicates that coffees of higher objective value were rated the worst by consumers, and the objectively worst as the best.