Price and brand name as indicators of quality dimensions for consumer durables

Delivering quality products requires an understanding of the critical dimensions and cues that consumers use to judge quality. To that end, this article addresses two fundamental research issues. Using a qualitative study, the authors first develop a generalizable typology of quality dimensions for durable goods that includes ease of use, versatility, durability, serviceability, performance, and prestige. Second, the authors conduct a process-tracing laboratory experiment to examine how key marketing variables—price, brand name, and product attributes—affect consumers’ judgment processes and inferences about how products perform on the six quality dimensions. Results of the experiment indicate that consumers use price and brand name differently to judge the quality dimensions, searching for price and brand name much more frequently when evaluating prestige than when evaluating any other quality dimension. Results suggest that managers must determine the relevant quality dimensions for a product category and the cues that are salient for judging those dimensions. Merrie Brucks is a professor of marketing at the University of Arizona, where she also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. She received her Ph. D. in marketing from Carnegie Mellon University. Her research first received scholarly recognition in 1984, when she won the Robert Ferber Award for the best doctoral dissertation in the field of consumer behavior. Since that time, she has published extensively in consumer psychology, focusing on memory, information search, judgment, and decision-making processes. In other research she has examined a variety of public policy issues related to advertising. Valarie A. Zeithaml is a professor and area chair at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is also a Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Scholar at that institution. She obtained an MBA and doctorate from the University of Maryland and has devoted the past 20 years to researching and teaching the topics of service quality and services management. She is the author ofDelivery Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations and ofServices Marketing, a textbook now in its second edition. She has won numerous teaching and research awards, including the Ferber Award from theJournal of Consumer Research, the Maynard Award from theJournal of Marketing, the Jagdish Sheth Award from theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the O’Dell Award from theJournal of Marketing Research. Gillian Naylor is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. She obtained a doctorate from the University of Arizona in 1996. Her research interests are within the consumer judgment and decision-making domain, with specific interest in postpurchase processes and services marketing.