Marketing is critical to the success of every business venture. Irrespective of what you do, it is marketing that converts it to cash. Selling is the art of exchanging products in return for cash but marketing is doing it repeatedly with the same people. Selling gains the attention of buyers but it is marketing that ensures repeated patronage and converts these sellers to customers (consumers). For buyers to become customers they must be sure that the product has value that is consistent over time. It is Quality Assurance that ensures this is met. A company may work hard to get the attention of buyers but it is the quality of a product over time that sustains this attention and converts buyers to customers which eventually leads to brand loyalty. Consistency in the quality of a product over time is what gives rise to brand loyalty.
Marketing has been defined as a process which identifies, anticipates and satisfies customer needs/requirements profitably. This implies that aside from making profit, the focus of marketing is to anticipate, identify and satisfy customer requirements in a way that builds a solid and sustained relationship that guarantees repeated patronage. This places emphasis more on customer satisfaction and a little less on profit to be made. Even though both are equally important, the balance is delicate and must be carefully managed.
To ensure that goods produced are fit for their intended use, producers must manufacture products which offer value to the consumer. Every good marketing strategy must communicate the value/usefulness/quality of a product to the consumers. Most marketing strategies fail because they adopt approaches which focus more on profitability than on consumer satisfaction. A consumer who has the impression that a product only takes money from the pocket without offering some value in return will not continue to buy the product. A good marketing strategy shows consumers values to be derived from using a product. This is what will convince the consumer to keep coming back for the product. Goods and services are purchased not because of how cheap or expensive they are but primarily because of the value to be derived from the product. To a consumer, price is secondary to value/quality. Every QA policy maker must bear this in mind.
Basically, I view QA from the perspective of ensuring that consumers receive products that have consistency in value. The aim of QA is to not just to police the production process but to ensure all processes are reproducible and to the highest degree of accuracy. Any compromise on quality or value, if not detected and corrected immediately will be noticed by consumers and if the drop in value/quality persists it will lead to drop in sales and by extension profits. Profit is tied to consistency in the quality of a product.
QA personnel are forever tasked with the responsibility of finding a balance between product quality and product cost. No matter how costly it may be to maintain the quality standards of products, we should never lose sight of the fact that it will always be cheaper to maintain quality than to reduce cost of product by making compromise on quality. For products to be passed fit for distribution QA must certify in writing that its specifications meet marketing authorization. Products that fall short of its marketing authorization give room for litigations with grave consequences for QA and Production Manager and not much blame for marketers. They market the goods they are given and may not have the tools to assess such products. The case of ‘My Pikin’ Baby Teething Mixture which killed 84 children in Nigeria in 2008 comes readily to mind. The QA officer and Production Manager were sentenced to 7 years in jail in 2013. No marketer was charged to court. This is a lesson.
Marketing is the fulcrum upon which companies rotate. All other departments of a company depend on the income brought in by marketers to survive. QA should have a robust mechanism for addressing and resolving product return/recall issues. Products with high rate of market returns, in my opinion, is an indication of poor quality assurance while products with little or no market returns have high quality.
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