In this article, the author reviews and synthesizes the varying definitions of product quality arising from philosophy, economics, marketing, and operations management. He then goes on to build an eight-dimensional framework to elaborate on these definitions. Using this framework, he addresses the empirical relationships between quality and variables such as price, advertising, market share, cost, and profitability.
What Does “Product Quality” Really Mean?
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Ken Goodpaster, Ted Levitt, John Quelch, members of the Production and Operations Management area at the Harvard Business School, and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the Division of Research at the Harvard Business School for its financial support.