Industry Standards

Lately, I've been assaulted from several angles with the phrase "industry standard." I have heard this phrase uttered at least a dozen times in the past few weeks by people who either are utterly lacking a sense of irony, or who believe that being "industry standard" is something they feel gives them a sense of pride, rather than a sense of shame.

To proclaim that your product meets standards would seem to be a claim of quality, but my sense is that customers have largely learned that "our product meets government standards" or "industry standards" is nothing impressive. In effect, a claim of meeting standards is a declaration that "we are doing the absolute minimum we think we can get away with."

Government standards were put in place because of widespread problems in a given industry - to the point that their products were so shoddy that they constituted a danger to the public. And industry standards are little better - they are generally established as an attempt to prevent government standards from being created by setting a minimum level of quality to which individual manufacturers could voluntarily comply.

And further, compliance to industry standards creates commoditization of goods and services. If every company's product merely meets standards, none is better than any other, and the customer is left to choose on price or convenience. And while the intention of standards may be argued to have been ensuring products meet a certain minimum level of quality, the effect is that they also ensure that companies are discouraged from doing better.

With this in mind, it doesn't make much sense for a company to set a goal of merely meeting standards, nor does it make sense for customers to accept a product that merely does the absolute minimum that it is required to do in order to avoid being legally penalized.

Granted, that may be a political point rather than a practical one, but it does identify an opportunity for a firm to gain competitive advantage: the firm that breaks away from the informal cartel of standard-compliance has a distinct advantage over those that seek to merely comply.