Fit and Quality
Why do we consider some products to have high quality? This is a simple-sounding but actually complex question. The common answer is to repeat the legalism about obscenity: I can’t define good quality, but I know it when I see it. That answer, of course, just begs the question, but there’s a kernel of truth in it. High quality is in large part assigned by a community, sometimes in fairly arbitrary ways.
During the 1990’s Toyota was in the process of establishing Lexus as a high-quality luxury brand. They had noticed that fit and finish (as the Detroit auto makers would have put it) were central to the American perception of quality in an automobile. They had in fact designed the Lexus to have just about the best fit and finish possible at the time. A famous TV commercial touted this attention to fit. In the commercial, a ball bearing rolls over the gaps between the car’s body parts to show how well and consistently they fit together.
Clearly, Toyota was right about the car-buying community’s views on quality; they had made other decisions about quality based on their observations that also hit the spot.
This social nature of judgments about quality means that abstract “six sigma” approaches to quality will likely be ineffective in isolation. One has to focus on what the target audience considers to be of high quality. Statistical measures should be based on these judgment, if it makes sense to use them at all. This is where the interactive web can help. The challenge there is, as mentioned here before, to cut through the large number of voices and be heard.
