Better know your customer needs & expectations and consciously decide (not) to address them; maximize your products/services perceived value and your customer satisfaction; Persuade your customer segments to pay a value-based price … these are the benefits of having quality and marketing working hand in hand …
Customer satisfaction
“Production: Quality can be defined as conformance to specifications. The degree to which a product meets the design specifications offering a satisfaction factor that fulfils all the expectations that a customer wants.”
Perceived value
“Value: Quality means providing value to the customer; that is, offering conditions of product use or service that meet or exceed customer’s expectations”… and satisfaction!
Quality allows to “over-deliver”, which exactly is what is sought after by marketing as an incentive to buy and to recommend.
It will also allow to evolve towards a value-based pricing
Customer needs
Identifying the differentiators for the customers’ segments implies knowing what keeps them awake at night. Those customer needs and expectations must be known and the actions that can be taken must be listed. Decision as to address those needs or not lies with management. At least, it will be a conscious decision.
Context of the organization
This chapter is present in the High Level Structure underlying the newly published ISO standards. It underlines the importance of the ecosystem and covers:
- on the one hand the context in which the organization is evolving. This refers to its ecosystem and ideally calls upon a permanent market watch. This can be performed via strategic intelligence methods, to detect trends.
- On the other hand the stakeholders management – or the so-called interested parties: customers of course but also competitors, regulators, neighbors, … to name but a few. This helps building classical -but still useful – marketing tools such as SWOT, PORTER analysis, …
It therefore make sense for both quality and marketing departments of an organization to join forces to develop and analyze customers’ satisfaction surveys and Voice of Customers’ programs.
Source for the quality definition: Geneva Business News
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