It’s just not the same

According to Investopedia.com quality management is the act of overseeing all activities and tasks to maintain a desired level of excellence. Quality management is an important part of operations management, and is one of the top priorities in a business that produces not only goods, but services. Lots of times companies encounter an issue where they have to compromise quality in order to increase profits. In our puppet class activity, we discussed the importance of having a unified quality standard. When one department thinks something may be acceptable, and the next department doesn’t let it go through then that becomes a vicious cycle of resource waste. What happens when a huge client or huge profits are on the line? In those cases this may result in ethical issues.

There are many people out there that choose the items they buy based on either the price, or the reputation of the company. It costs millions of dollars for companies to establish a reliable and trustworthy reputation; it also costs them to maintain that reputation. Eventually companies strive to increase their profit by increasing their productivity, without diminishing their quality. Productivity can be increased by perfecting the process by which the product is produced, or being able to obtain cheaper raw materials.

What happens to companies that have a wide breadth of products? We would hope that a company with a good reputation would make sure each and every one of their products is maintaining its quality; unfortunately that is not always the case.  Let’s take a look at a company that is widely respected, with a huge range of products.

Lancôme is one of those companies that has a wide breadth products. Although it’s all cosmetics, they range from face wash to eye shadows, to lipsticks. For the past couple of years I have been a huge fan of their voluminous mascara, and have suggested it to all of my friends. No matter how many new types of mascara Lancôme came out with, or other companies came out with; I never felt the need to make a change.

After a couple years of using that mascara, I felt it wasn’t doing the job quite the same. At first I thought it might have been a while that I had it, and it might have dried up. After I bought a couple more, I realized that the mascara was simply not the same. It looked the same, and was at the same price point, but it seemed that the quality had diminished. I don’t know if it was just the color or type I was buying, but I was no longer happy with the results.

I was very disappointed, and had to go through a few new ones to find one that I liked. I guess that’s what happens as new items are released by a company; more resources are put towards those products, and the old ones become less relevant. On the other hand,  the voluminous mascara is part of the cheaper line of products within the company. The low cost of the product might make it a little more difficult to maintain the quality when compared to their higher end products.

Do you guys think that companies with a more narrow scope of products tend to maintain quality a little better?

Is cost a direct reflection of the quality, even if it’s produced by a highly respected company?

 

 

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quality-management.asp

One thought on “It’s just not the same

  1. I don’t think that quality has a direct correlation with cost but there are definitely differences between some products with prices. There are certain products that I will spend extra money because I know that I am paying for quality but that is not true about everything. Sometimes things can be extrememly over priced because of the name but be worse than something that is a fraction of the cost.

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