Brand and Product Quality

I'm disturbed by a fact that, taken out of context, gives credence to a fallacy: the fact that customers will pay a higher price for a branded product that is inferior in quality has been misconstrued to indicate that brand sentiment and product quality have nothing to do with one another. I don't believe that to be entirely true.

I don't dispute that a cup of Starbucks coffee, which sells for five times the price of a cup of gas-station coffee, is not significantly better. In fact, I've had a few cups of cheap coffee that had a better flavor, less acrid and burned, than the coffee that Starbucks sells. And yet, when it's three in the afternoon and the slump sets in, I automatically think about going to Starbucks, rather than any other vendor, to get a cup of Joe - and from the length of the line, it's not uncommon behavior.

I also don't accept that customers are entirely ignorant that they are paying a higher price for lower quality when they purchase a branded product. I've remarked, and heard others remark, that Starbucks is not as good as it used to be, and that better coffee could be had for cheaper elsewhere, but there is an association that has been established, coffee equals Starbucks, that is as hard to break as any addiction, even though every purchase of a cup of Starbucks coffee comes with a side-order of regret for failure to consider the options that would result in getting better quality for less cash.

But back to the point: I don't think that a brand such as Starbucks could have made that association if it didn't, at some time, offer a distinctly better product, one that was worth the difference in price to a customer who cared about quality. Whatever the situation in the present day, I recall my first experience of Starbucks being one of "wow, this is really good coffee." And that sentiment has been sustained for longer than the quality of the product.

In the years since, the competitive landscape has changed. Gas stations and other restaurants improved the quality of their coffee, and I do think that Starbucks has let its own product quality slide, such that now there is little difference between them - but things were not always thus. I don't think I, or many other consumers, would have become hard-wired to the association that "coffee equals Starbucks" if there had never been a significant advantage in product quality.

However, for newer customers, those who don't remember the days when most coffee was really awful and Starbucks emerged on the scene with a better cup, the association between brand and quality is less valid. I have the sense that, for such persons, they are following the behavior of others. While consumers are not all sheep, many of them do tend to behave that way, following the actions of others without making any judgment of their own, and believing that popularity means superiority. While quality is not necessary to brand sentiment for such individuals, it remains important by proxy: they may not consider quality at all, but are merely following the choice of others - but those whom they choose to follow made their decision based on quality.

This leads to the question: how long can a brand sustain its appeal when the reasons that caused customers to prefer it are no longer valid? For the individual customer, the association is likely very hard to break, such that they will continue to purchase a brand even after quality has faded - provide that the quality does fade, slowly and over a long period of time, rather than a sudden and rapid decrease.

It would stand to reason that they continue to purchase a familiar brand until something better comes along and takes their attention - but given what I noted above about continuing to buy Starbucks even knowing there are better alternatives, it seems unlikely that the switch is instantaneous: there would have to be surreptitious contacts with a better brand to supplant a familiar brand.

This may ultimately be the reason that brands die with their customers. It's not that young people resist certain brands simply because they were popular with old people, and youth merely want to be different and use different brands - it's because the quality that their elders once associated with a brand is no longer valid, and the younger generation has no memory of the time at which it was so.

Back to personal experience, there are still a number of brands I buy that my parents, and even my grandparents, favored - but I tend to think it's because these companies have sustained product quality, such that the product isn't good simply because grandfather said so - it's good because it is objectively better.

But for many brands, the saying holds - "they don't make them like they used to" - and while the memory of quality that a product once had was enough to sustain my grandparents' loyalty, my own encounters did not have sufficient quality to make the Pavlovian connection, and I was easily won away.

To try to swing this meandering meditation back to where it started: establishing preference for a brand depends on product quality and the two cannot be divorced. To be effective, a brand must mean something - specifically, it must mean quality - or else it will not take hold with its original customers, and it will not gain sufficient popularity to draw the me-too crowd.

However, once a product reaches a certain level of maturity in its relationship with its customers, likely it can let itself slide and still retain their loyalty. But this does not mean that brand and product quality are entirely unrelated - they are separable, but cannot be separated until the association has taken root.