The focal point of any brand is enhancing profitability by increasing ROI and reducing wastes. These two complement each other perfectly and fall at the “doorsteps” of the marketing and quality assurance (QA) teams.
Bearing in mind that quality assurance (QA) is the process of verifying whether a product meets required specifications and customer expectations, as a process-driven approach that facilitates and defines goals regarding product design, development, and production it won’t be out of place to say that when you fail to make this the pathway to your product or service, you only succeed in making a wasteful process more efficient and you end up getting better at doing something the customer does not even want and will never cherish.
It will amount to beating a dead horse if for any reason you expect the marketing team to go out there and convince customers that there is a product or service the quality was not assured from the onset. According to McKinsey & Company, “the 3 Cs of customer satisfaction” are “consistency, consistency, and consistency.”
A report has it that with no marketing budget, zero connections, and a blog that was only a month old, Robbie Richards, grew his traffic to 272 percent in 30 days by creating quality content. According to Harvard Business Review, some 96.7 percent of 3,000 customers L.L. Bean surveyed said that quality is the attribute they like most about the company.
The way you can move your brand to such a height is the move to quality assurance and extended service programs. Infiniti offers four years or 60,000 miles for bumper-to-bumper, six years or 70,000 miles for powertrain, and four years with no mileage cap for roadside assistance.
It’s only natural that if you want to market anything you are certain has an extremely high degree of quality, you target your customers with renewed vigor, confidence, determination, purpose, and a high sense of reputation. With quality assurance, you are convinced that quality was enshrined in the process of developing the product.
You are emboldened by the goal of QA, which is to improve development and test processes so that defects do not arise when the product is being developed. You know that there was documentation of the prevention of quality problems through planned and systematic activities you can always fall on to convince consumers if the need arises.
Quality assurance aids marketing in that it is used to create the deliverables, and can be performed by a manager, client, or even a third-party reviewer. Examples of quality assurance include process checklists, project audits and methodology, and standards development.
If you bring in your consumers into the development of the product as QA is wont to do, the quality has already been attested for and the job of marketing has virtually been done halfway.
Direct benefits to marketing
1. A reputation for quality and reliability
Proper quality assurance processes ensure that even simple errors that may be considered negligible which can snowball into damaging your reputation, reducing customer confidence, increasing your competitive vulnerability, and hurting sales revenues eventually are detected and avoided. It, in no small way, enhances reputation, relationship with customers, and revenue (the 3Rs of strategic marketing).
According to analysis, around 40 percent of a [public] company’s market performance can be attributed to non-financial factors associated with its corporate reputation. For your brand to, however, benefit from the largess that comes from reputation, you must be reputation ready.
A surefire way for your brand to be reputable is to dish out quality products and services.
2. Time and money savings
As a marketer, your word should be your bond. You must endeavor to deliver on your promise or you lose your customer base to competitors.
You have the singular and all important opportunity to avoid wasting time and money by reducing the resources spent on repetitive correction cycles, helping to ensure that materials are delivered on time. And because the quality assurance team finds errors earlier in the development process, you avoid the expense of project reworks.
This also helps the marketing department to deliver on time especially in subscription-based products or services.
3. Sales growth
A quality conformance which reflects the needs of fitness for use and products to the design is associated with sales growth and better sales margins. Moreover, the most important benefit of a quality certification is its ability to increase market share and provide access to a new market.
In addition, the key to define quality is consumers’ and a company’s internal definition of quality that must reflect consumers’ requirements. Once your consumers are satisfied, they go about vouchsafing your product through the word-of-mouth and influencer marketing.
For your brand to continue enjoying its fair share of the market, you need continuously improving quality, listening to your customers, and developing a good branding strategy as the best key combinations and marketing mix to bringing a greater success.
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