Choicest quality? The founder of Anheuser-Busch called his King of Beers "dot schlop" and opted instead for wine

Have you ever been to a supermarket and read a label for an item which said “Made with only the lowest quality ingredients?”     Ever seen a resume, where the applicant admitted, under skill sets, that he didn’t have many?   Or noticed a restaurant sign, prominently displaying “Lack of Quality . . .  since [fill in a year far enough back to make the restaurant seem like a historical institution].”

Everywhere you look someone, somewhere, is proclaiming that his products are of the highest quality, that his company is the leading provider of such-and-such.  None of those grand-sounding adjectives ever needs to be qualified.  You and I know this obviously can’t be true.  If everyone were manufacturing or featuring products of the most sublime quality, then there’d be no such thing as low quality.  And yet we know from the broken DVD player and vacuum cleaner sitting in our garage, which never worked well and malfunctioned completely just after the warranty period ended but remain cost-ineffective to fix, that plenty of stuff out there, in fact most of it, is low quality.

We live in a marketing age, the age where the sizzle most definitely counts more than the steak.   It’s not that important if something is good; it’s far more important how effective one is in getting out the message that it’s good.

The companies know consumers can’t be that stupid to believe that everything they say is of the highest quality actually is.  They also know that if enough companies are shouting into a potential customer’s ear an almost identical message that their product is super special, perhaps using a celebrity to shill it, then the customer will grow more confused and find it more difficult to figure out which of the companies really does make the highest quality.   Quality ceases to become an easy saleable issue if everyone’s boasting they’ve got it.

Still, salesmen never cease to use it.  It’s one of their favorite defenses, when a customer tries to beat them down on price.  “We prefer to rest our reputation on quality, not price.”  Heard that one before?

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