Quality Concerns in Marketing: Should You Ensure Perfect Samples for Reviews?

You are a product manager for a line of bedroom furniture and have released for sale the company’s newest collection of beds, dressers, armoires, and nightstands. Due to quality and production problems, the release of the collection was delayed, with a corresponding negative impact on company sales. You remain skeptical of the furniture’s quality but were under tremendous pressure to authorize the selling of the new furniture. As part of your introductory marketing efforts, a sample bedroom set (bed, dresser, and nightstand) will be distributed to 10 women across the country, with the understanding that they will post their reviews on various sites online. Obviously, positive reviews would benefit sales.

You’ve just received an email from the shipping and receiving manager. While not part of the normal customer shipping process, she has asked if you’d like her and her team to hand-pick, inspect, and, if necessary, repair or replace the sample furniture pieces that will be sent to the 10 women. The manager wants to know if you’d like her to ensure the quality of all the pieces, thereby almost guaranteeing positive reviews of your product. So... what would you do?

Definition of Marketing Management

"Marketing management is 'the art and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value' (Kotler and Keller, 2008: 5)."

In your case, you know very well that the product does not meet the quality standards. In that case, pushing the selected pieces to the market in order to get better reviews may fetch the orders initially, but what about thereafter? If you manipulate the good reviews in the beginning, you will get future orders. However, there could be dissatisfied customers who also have every authority to write bad reviews. How will you manage those bad reviews? When the bad reviews outnumber the good reviews, it will typecast your company, and wriggling out of this bad publicity will become very difficult.

Therefore, the best thing is to improve the quality of the product. Marketing is not for conning the customers.

Thanks,

Dinesh Divekar