Why Everything You Know About “Quality Products” Is Wrong
There’s a myth around QUALITY.
How often have you heard:
“Quality matters.”
Or…
“The way to make sure your product or service sells well is to make it THE BEST IN THE WORLD!”
Or…
“When you present someone with a high-quality decision, product or service – the choice becomes obvious! You don’t need to use influence, sales or marketing tactics to convince someone!”
In fact, Australia, the slogan behind Arnott’s Biscuits is:
“There’s no substitute for quality.”
The truth is:
When it comes to sales and decision-making, quality DOESN’T matter in the way you probably think it does.
There ARE substitutes for quality.
Most of the time, your customers CAN’T TELL what quality is – and that’s the reason why they’re buying your competitor’s inferior widget instead of your superior one.
Studies have consistently shown that even the EXPERTS (people who SHOULD know better) have trouble distinguishing average products from high-quality products.
Before we go on, let me be clear…
I am not advocating “poor quality” products, services, marketing, or sales techniques.
(Yes, quality can be a shorthand way of talking about engineered precision, safety, or endurance. And it’s a good idea to invest a “high quality” parachute.)
But all too often:
High quality products, services and decisions are not recognised for their quality by consumers;
Low quality products, services and decisions are perceived to be higher quality than they actually are;
This is because the way our brain responds to “quality” is typically not about the underlying product at all. It’s about a “sense” or “feeling” – based on social signals, biases, and mental shortcuts – that can be exploited or tricked into making the wrong assessment of quality.
(Think about a quality meal, a quality wine, a quality service, a quality hotel, a quality shirt, a quality outfit, quality headphones, quality furniture… In these cases, “quality” can be subjective and difficult to discern.)
These “misfires” in our brain can be (and are!) exploited by practitioners of influence
If you know how to use these social signals, biases, and mental shortcuts – you become more influential in your marketing, sales, and leadership – and better able to make informed decisions.
Over the coming days and weeks, I want to share some of these “misfires” in our brain with you…
…And the perfect way to do this is by looking at wine!
After all, a high quality Grand Cru can sell for thousands, while a bottle of cleanskin no-name plonk sells for a few bucks.
Even when the experts can’t tell the difference!
The Snobs Who Hated One Of The World’s Top Wines…
There’s a brilliant story of Penfolds Grange – one of the most celebrated wines in the world – that goes back to 1988.
Back then, the French cultural icon Bernard Pivot was running a panel TV show called ‘Apostrophes’.
It was a hugely popular show – broadcast in prime time on Friday nights to 6 million viewers – and it featured kings of culture chatting about literature, wine, and all things highbrow.
One week, their British wine expert guest was a woman named Jancis Robinson.
Having just toured the winemaking regions of Australia, she’d been impressed with this one particular discovery she’d made – a bottle of Penfolds Grange.
Wanting to share it with the world, she brought it with her…
Presenting this bottle to the panellists – the cultural elite of France, whose eye for quality was unrivalled – she boldly announced it was an incredible Australian Shiraz called Penfolds Grange.
As soon as the word ‘Australian’ spilled from her mouth – long before the bottle had been opened – you could see the stuffy mens’ noses scrunch up.
After a taste, these kings of culture held nothing back.
“Un vin de pharmacien!”
Exclaimed one of the panelists!
In other words – it’s the type of wine a pharmacist or chemist would make. Someone whose nose was surrounded by strong chemicals all day, not someone who had the tuned senses of a winemaker. Someone who understood scientific processes, but not fine technique.
Not the type of wine a true master craftsman would meticulously develop and nurture.
And certainly not the type of wine that warranted much discussion on France’s most popular cultural tv show!
What’s funny about this story isn’t just that the wine he was tasting had plenty of awards.
It’s that the “pharmacist” he mentions – Penfolds Chief Winemaker John Ditter – was named International Winemaker of the Year in 1989 (just one year later).
(Not bad for a pharmacist, hey.)
Jancis Robinson – the wine critic who brought the bottle of Grange to the TV show – diplomatically shrugs this off as a matter of personal preference and taste.
But there’s actually something BIGGER in this – and it’s about the perception of quality.
In marketing, sales, and influence – we talk about “being the best”.
Or “having the best product”.
Because we know that the distinction between “the best” and “the rest” makes a decision obvious.
But QUALITY is really difficult to discern.
Not just by amateurs… but by experts too.
Even professional wine testers have difficulty telling the difference between an average, and an award-winning wine.
In fact, we don’t REALLY recognise quality. What we’re doing is recognising the signals AROUND quality.
And this means we get FALSE signals about what QUALITY really is.
If you want to increase your influence – as a leader, marketer, or salesperson – I encourage you to understand what these signals are.
Because our perception of quality does carry a lot of weight and influence in decision-making. But the way we think about quality is wrong.
If you’re interested in increasing your influence (as a leader, marketer, or salesperson) using quality, make sure you’re subscribed to receive the next part of this series: