Gaps between Manufacturer and Consumer Priorities

To develop the innovative and high-quality products required by their customers, Patagonia succeeded in a third strategic area, specifically quality control. Despite being a huge cost for Patagonia, quality control was necessary to enable them to deliver on the two aforementioned strategic goals. To obtain a high level of quality, Patagonia developed long term relationships with reliable vendors for production of goods and procurement of materials, which resulted in a drastically lower defect rate than competitors

Given the highly competitive nature of today’s markets we as a company must provide high quality products to survive. Quality itself has become a major competitive factor and in many ways is a contributing factor in success or failure. The intent of this memo is to identify, explain and evaluate the three types of cost associated with quality.

Today’s consumers are constantly trying to judge the quality of products. But what is quality? How and by whom is quality determined? Some would say the designer creates specifications, which in turn dictate the quality of a product. That quality is also based on the acceptable value of a part within a whole product.

If the company has a good reputation among consumers and its products is a popular choice, the customers become interested in the company’s ability to maintain stability of manufacturing.

Companies are continually coming out with new products; most new products are improvements of past products. However, the way a company markets a product and to whom they market the product can make a drastic difference in regards to the sales performance. Two products can be nearly identical and marketed very differently, while two products can be polar opposites and marketed almost identically. Two products that are similar but marketed differently are the iPad and the Amazon Fire tablet, and two that are different, but marketed similarly are Nike tennis shoes and Oakley sunglasses. It is important to understand how a company markets a product, but it is just as important to know why a company is marketing a product a certain way. The

Putting their product ethos and production process front and center highlights the quality and the uniqueness of their product and ultimately instills confidence in users.

3. Sociocultural: “negative customer perceptions regarding the safety of the products we sell could cause us to lose market share to our competitors.” Page 10.

How can Harley Davidson marketing and sales, personnel interact with its purchasing personnel to further strengthen the supply chain and improve customer loyalty?

The positioning strategy should be driven by the market, rather than by the ambitions of the product champions. The source of the problem is failure to understand how consumers' value product attributes. In all, over-appreciating a breakthrough or new technology that

This gain value and addresses a key decisive achievement factor in the industry (Grant,2010). As position is important to offer convenience and a deep assortment, An extra unique intangible resource would be their brand representation and customer loyalty, this is vital since it can attract or attract consumers and it could be necessary to build the brand image .

Description of how Woolworths manages quality and determine how effective Woolworths is at managing quality.

• Have open and honest communication with vendors concerning what is going good and bad with their products

17.   Reducing the variations in our product or services is an important key to perceived quality TRUE

Moreover, the products were developed based on what the company believed the consumers wanted (O’Neill 2010). The group completely forgot one of the keys of success of every company, the customers and their needs.

Our company should make sure that manufacturers deliver products with the highest design specification, in order to be order-winner quality conformance, by delivering products with no defects (Hill and Hill, 2012). Furthermore, improvements in quality lead to a decrease in cost for the company. According to (Evans, 1997) higher quality products lead to a decrease in costs for the company through higher productivity: ‘improvements in quality leads to lower cost because of less re-work, fewer mistakes, fewer delays and snags’ (Evans 1997, P.55).